Word study

Bath

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: baths, bathed, bath, bathing. 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 “bath” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • בַּת bathbathtranslated this way 13 times of its 13 uses · Strong’s H1324Noun  ·  Translated: baths 7, bath 5, measured by the bath 1

    1 Kings 7:26 It was a handbreadth thick, and its rim was fashioned like the brim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It could hold two thousand baths.

    2 Chronicles 2:10 I will pay your servants, the woodcutters, 20,000 cors of ground wheat, 20,000 cors of barley, 20,000 baths of wine, and 20,000 baths of olive oil.”

    Full study and all 8 verses →
  • רָחַץ râchatswash, wash off, away, bathetranslated this way 7 times of its 72 uses · Strong’s H7364Verb  ·  Translated: bathe 23, wash 19, washed 14, bathed 6

    Leviticus 22:6 the man who touches any of these will remain unclean until evening. He must not eat from the sacred offerings unless he has bathed himself with water.

    2 Samuel 11:2 One evening David got up from his bed and strolled around on the roof of the palace. And from the roof he saw a woman bathing— a very beautiful woman.

    Full study and all 71 verses →
  • בַּת bathbathtranslated this way 2 times of its 2 uses · Strong’s H1325Noun  ·  Translated: baths 2

    Ezra 7:22 up to a hundred talents of silver, a hundred cors of wheat, a hundred baths of wine, a hundred baths of olive oil, and salt without limit.

    Full study and its 1 verse →
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.

What the Bible says about bath: passages by topic →

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.