Word study

Attend

4 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: attend, attended, attending, attends. 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 “attend” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • פָּקַד pâqadattend to, visit, muster, appointtranslated this way 19 times of its 294 uses · Strong’s H6485Verb  ·  Translated: punish 41, numbered 26, appointed 15, counted 14

    Genesis 21:1 Now the LORD attended to Sarah as He had said, and the LORD did for Sarah what He had promised.

    Exodus 3:16 Go, assemble the elders of Israel and say to them, ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob — has appeared to me and said: I have surely attended to you and have seen what has been done to you in Egypt.

    Full study and all 267 verses →
  • קָשַׁב qâshabincline, attendtranslated this way 7 times of its 46 uses · Strong’s H7181Verb  ·  Translated: listen 12, pay attention 10, Attend 6, incline 2

    Psalm 5:2 Attend to the sound of my cry, my King and my God, for to You I pray.

    Proverbs 7:24 Now, my sons, listen to me, and attend to the words of my mouth.

    Full study and all 45 verses →
  • שָׁמַר shâmarkeep, watch, preservetranslated this way 4 times of its 461 uses · Strong’s H8104Verb  ·  Translated: keep 133, careful 39, kept 33, guard 25

    Numbers 18:3 And they shall attend to your duties and to all the duties of the Tent; but they must not come near to the furnishings of the sanctuary or the altar, or both they and you will die.

    Numbers 18:4 They are to join you and attend to the duties of the Tent of Meeting, doing all the work at the Tent; but no outsider may come near you.

    Full study and all 436 verses →
  • עָבַד âbadwork, servetranslated this way 2 times of its 286 uses · Strong’s H5647Verb  ·  Translated: serve 110, served 44, worship 32, work 9

    Numbers 3:7 They are to perform duties for him and for the whole congregation before the Tent of Meeting, attending to the service of the tabernacle.

    Numbers 3:8 They shall take care of all the furnishings of the Tent of Meeting and fulfill obligations for the Israelites by attending to the service of the tabernacle.

    Full study and all 259 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.