Word study

Fame

4 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “fame”. 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 “fame” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • שֵׁם shêmnametranslated this way 9 times of its 769 uses · Strong’s H8034Noun  ·  Translated: name 553, names 65, named 61, him 20

    Joshua 9:9 “Your servants have come from a very distant land,” they replied, “because of the fame of the LORD your God. For we have heard the reports about Him: all that He did in Egypt,

    1 Kings 4:31 He was wiser than all men— wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and wiser than Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol. And his fame spread throughout the surrounding nations.

    Full study and all 703 verses →
  • שֵׁמַע shêmasoundtranslated this way 4 times of its 18 uses · Strong’s H8088Noun  ·  Translated: report 5, fame 4, news 3, hear 2

    Numbers 14:15 If You kill this people as one man, the nations who have heard of Your fame will say,

    1 Kings 10:1 Now when the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon concerning the name of the LORD, she came to test him with difficult questions.

    Full study and all 17 verses →
  • שֹׁמַע shômareporttranslated this way 2 times of its 4 uses · Strong’s H8089Noun  ·  Translated: fame 2, reports 1, report 1

    Joshua 6:27 So the LORD was with Joshua, and his fame spread throughout the land.

    Esther 9:4 For Mordecai exercised great power in the palace, and his fame spread throughout the provinces as he became more and more powerful.

    Full study and all 4 verses →
  • זֵכֶר zêkerremembrance, memorialtranslated this way 1 time of its 23 uses · Strong’s H2143Noun  ·  Translated: memory 11, remembered 3, renown 3, name 2

    Psalm 145:7 They will extol the fame of Your abundant goodness and sing joyfully of Your righteousness.

    Full study and all 23 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.