Word study

Crawl

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • רָמַשׂ râmascreep, move lightly, move abouttranslated this way 10 times of its 16 uses · Strong’s H7430Verb  ·  Translated: crawls 8, moves 3, creature that crawls 2, moved 1

    Genesis 1:26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.”

    Leviticus 11:44 For I am the LORD your God; consecrate yourselves, therefore, and be holy, because I am holy. You must not defile yourselves by any creature that crawls along the ground.

    Full study and all 16 verses →
  • רֶמֶשׂ remescreeping things, moving thingstranslated this way 8 times of its 16 uses · Strong’s H7431Noun  ·  Translated: crawling creature 4, creature 2, crawling creatures 2

    Genesis 1:25 God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that crawls upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

    Psalm 148:10 wild animals and all cattle, crawling creatures and flying birds,

    Full study and all 16 verses →
  • שֶׁרֶץ sheretsswarmers, swarming thingstranslated this way 4 times of its 15 uses · Strong’s H8318Noun  ·  Translated: insects 4, crawling creature 3, creature 3, creatures 2

    Leviticus 5:2 Or if a person touches anything unclean— whether the carcass of any unclean wild animal or livestock or crawling creature— even if he is unaware of it, he is unclean and guilty.

    Leviticus 11:31 These animals are unclean for you among all the crawling creatures. Whoever touches them when they are dead shall be unclean until evening.

    Full study and all 15 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.