Word study

Adversity

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “adversity”. 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 “adversity” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • רַע rabad, eviltranslated this way 8 times of its 651 uses · Strong’s H7451Adjective  ·  Translated: evil 263, disaster 72, harm 38, wicked 31

    2 Samuel 12:11 This is what the LORD says: ‘I will raise up adversity against you from your own house. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to another, and he will lie with them in broad daylight.

    Job 2:10 “You speak as a foolish woman speaks,” he told her. “Should we accept from God only good and not adversity?” In all this, Job did not sin in what he said.

    Full study and all 615 verses →
  • צָרָה tsârâhid.translated this way 2 times of its 73 uses · Strong’s H6869Noun  ·  Translated: distress 30, trouble 20, troubles 6, anguish 5

    2 Chronicles 15:6 Nation was crushed by nation, and city by city, for God afflicted them with all kinds of adversity.

    Proverbs 17:17 A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.

    Full study and all 72 verses →
  • צַר tsarnarrow, tighttranslated this way 1 time of its 110 uses · Strong’s H6862Noun  ·  Translated: enemies 22, foes 22, distress 18, enemy 10

    Isaiah 30:20 The Lord will give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, but your Teacher will no longer hide Himself — with your own eyes you will see Him.

    Full study and all 106 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.