Word study

Lowest

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • תַּחְתִּי tachtîlower, lowesttranslated this way 2 times of its 19 uses · Strong’s H8482Noun  ·  Translated: depths 9, lower 4, below 3, lowest 2

    Nehemiah 4:13 So I stationed men behind the lowest sections of the wall, at the vulnerable areas. I stationed them by families with their swords, spears, and bows.

    Psalm 88:6 You have laid me in the lowest Pit, in the darkest of the depths.

    Full study and all 19 verses →
  • יְרֵכָה yerêkâhflank, sidetranslated this way 2 times of its 28 uses · Strong’s H3411Noun  ·  Translated: rear 4, ends 3, far 3, two back 2

    Isaiah 14:15 But you will be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit.

    Jonah 1:5 The sailors were afraid, and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the ship’s cargo into the sea to lighten the load. But Jonah had gone down to the lowest part of the vessel, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep.

    Full study and all 28 verses →
  • תַּחְתּוֹן tachtônlower, lowesttranslated this way 1 time of its 13 uses · Strong’s H8481Adjective  ·  Translated: lower 11, bottom 1, lowest story 1

    Ezekiel 41:7 The side rooms surrounding the temple widened at each successive level, because the structure surrounding the temple ascended by stages corresponding to the narrowing of the temple wall as it rose upward. And so a stairway went up from the lowest story to the highest, through the middle one.

    Full study and all 13 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.