Word study

Allot

4 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: allotted, allot. 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 “allot” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • גּוֹרָל gôrâllottranslated this way 8 times of its 74 uses · Strong’s H1486Noun  ·  Translated: lot 35, lots 17, allotted 6, allotment 4

    Numbers 36:3 But if they marry any of the men from the other tribes of Israel, their inheritance will be withdrawn from the portion of our fathers and added to the tribe into which they marry. So our allotted inheritance would be taken away.

    Joshua 18:11 The first lot came up for the clans of the tribe of Benjamin. Their allotted territory lay between the tribes of Judah and Joseph:

    Full study and all 66 verses →
  • נָפַל nâphalfall, lietranslated this way 6 times of its 432 uses · Strong’s H5307Verb  ·  Translated: fall 104, fell 77, fallen 54, falls 21

    Numbers 34:2 “Command the Israelites and say to them: When you enter the land of Canaan, it will be allotted to you as an inheritance with these boundaries:

    Joshua 23:4 See, I have allotted as an inheritance to your tribes these remaining nations, including all the nations I have already cut off, from the Jordan westward to the Great Sea.

    Full study and all 403 verses →
  • חָלַק châlaqdivide, sharetranslated this way 3 times of its 65 uses · Strong’s H2505Verb  ·  Translated: divided 14, divide 9, distributed 4, dividing 3

    Nehemiah 9:22 You gave them kingdoms and peoples and allotted to them every corner of the land. So they took the land of Sihon king of Heshbon and of Og king of Bashan.

    Isaiah 53:12 Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, because He has poured out His life unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.

    Full study and all 64 verses →
  • פֶּחָה pechâhgovernortranslated this way 2 times of its 28 uses · Strong’s H6346Noun  ·  Translated: governors 14, governor 8, officer 2, allotted to the governor 2

    Nehemiah 5:14 Furthermore, from the day King Artaxerxes appointed me to be their governor in the land of Judah, from his twentieth year until his thirty-second year (twelve years total), neither I nor my brothers ate the food allotted to the governor.

    Nehemiah 5:18 Each day one ox, six choice sheep, and some fowl were prepared for me, and once every ten days an abundance of all kinds of wine was provided. But I did not demand the food allotted to the governor, because the burden on the people was so heavy.

    Full study and all 27 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.