Word study

Cistern

4 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • בּוֹר bôrpit, cistern, welltranslated this way 16 times of its 62 uses · Strong’s H953Noun  ·  Translated: Pit 34, cistern 14, well 6, dungeon 2

    Leviticus 11:36 Nevertheless, a spring or cistern containing water will remain clean, but one who touches a carcass in it will be unclean.

    1 Samuel 13:6 Seeing that they were in danger because their troops were hard-pressed, the men of Israel hid in caves and thickets, among the rocks, and in cellars and cisterns.

    Full study and all 59 verses →
  • בֹּאר bôrcistern, pit, welltranslated this way 2 times of its 4 uses · Strong’s H877Noun  ·  Translated: well 2, cisterns 2

    Jeremiah 2:13 “For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water, and they have dug their own cisterns — broken cisterns that cannot hold water.

    Full study and all 3 verses →
  • גֶּבֶא gebecistern, pooltranslated this way 1 time of its 2 uses · Strong’s H1360Noun  ·  Translated: cistern 1, marshes 1

    Isaiah 30:14 It will break in pieces like a potter’s jar, shattered so that no fragment can be found. Not a shard will be found in the dust large enough to scoop the coals from a hearth or to skim the water from a cistern.”

    Full study and all 2 verses →
  • גֵּב gêbpittranslated this way 1 time of its 3 uses · Strong’s H1356Noun  ·  Translated: beams 1, full of ditches 1, cisterns 1

    Jeremiah 14:3 The nobles send their servants for water; they go to the cisterns, but find no water; their jars return empty. They are ashamed and humiliated; they cover their heads.

    Full study and all 3 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.

What the Bible says about cistern: 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.