Word study

Adulteress

4 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: adulteress, adulteresses. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.

At a glance

How often each original word is translated “adulteress” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • נָאַף nâaphcommit adulterytranslated this way 3 times of its 29 uses · Strong’s H5003Verb  ·  Translated: commit adultery 6, adulterers 6, committed adultery 5, commits adultery 2

    Leviticus 20:10 If a man commits adultery with another man’s wife— with the wife of his neighbor— both the adulterer and the adulteress must surely be put to death.

    Ezekiel 23:45 But righteous men will sentence them to the punishment of those who commit adultery and bloodshed, because they are adulteresses with blood on their hands.

    Full study and all 25 verses →
  • זוּר zûrbe a strangertranslated this way 3 times of its 76 uses · Strong’s H2114Adjective  ·  Translated: foreigners 13, strangers 12, outsider 9, stranger 8

    Proverbs 5:20 Why be captivated, my son, by an adulteress, or embrace the bosom of a stranger?

    Proverbs 7:5 that they may keep you from the adulteress, from the stranger with seductive words.

    Full study and all 75 verses →
  • נׇכְרִי nokrîforeign, alientranslated this way 2 times of its 42 uses · Strong’s H5237Adjective  ·  Translated: foreign 14, foreigner 13, foreigners 4, stranger 4

    Proverbs 6:24 to keep you from the evil woman, from the smooth tongue of the adulteress.

    Proverbs 23:27 For a prostitute is a deep pit, and an adulteress is a narrow well.

    Full study and all 42 verses →
  • אִשָּׁה ishshâhwoman, wife, femaletranslated this way 2 times of its 711 uses · Strong’s H802Noun  ·  Translated: wife 251, woman 172, wives 92, women 88Full study and all 638 verses →

Greek words (New Testament)

  • μοιχαλίς moichalísan adulteresstranslated this way 3 times of its 7 uses · Strong’s G3428Noun  ·  Translated: adulterous 3, adulteress 2, adulteresses 1, adultery 1

    Romans 7:3 So then, if she is joined to another man while her husband is still alive, she is called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is free from that law and is not an adulteress if she marries another man.

    James 4:4 You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God.

    Full study and all 6 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
  2. Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.

Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.