Word study

Infant

2 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • יָנַק yânaqsucktranslated this way 9 times of its 31 uses · Strong’s H3243Verb  ·  Translated: nurse 11, infant 4, infants 4, nursed 3

    Numbers 11:12 Did I conceive all these people? Did I give them birth, so that You should tell me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries an infant,’ to the land that You swore to give their fathers?

    Deuteronomy 32:25 Outside, the sword will take their children, and inside, terror will strike the young man and the young woman, the infant and the gray-haired man.

    Full study and all 30 verses →
  • עוֹלֵל ôlêlchildtranslated this way 5 times of its 20 uses · Strong’s H5768Noun  ·  Translated: children 11, infants 4

    Job 3:16 Or why was I not hidden like a stillborn child, like an infant who never sees daylight?

    Psalm 137:9 Blessed is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

    Full study and all 20 verses →

Greek words (New Testament)

  • νήπιος nḗpiosan infant, child, unlearnedtranslated this way 4 times of its 15 uses · Strong’s G3516Adjective  ·  Translated: child 5, infants 3, little children 2, children 2

    Romans 2:20 an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants, because you have in the law the embodiment of knowledge and truth —

    1 Corinthians 3:1 Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly — as infants in Christ.

    Full study and all 11 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.