Word study

Mate

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • אִשָּׁה ishshâhwoman, wife, femaletranslated this way 2 times of its 711 uses · Strong’s H802Noun  ·  Translated: wife 251, woman 172, wives 92, women 88

    Genesis 7:2 You are to take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate; a pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate;

    Full study and all 638 verses →
  • רָבַע râbalie stretched out, lie downtranslated this way 2 times of its 3 uses · Strong’s H7250Verb  ·  Translated: mate 2, crossbreed 1

    Leviticus 18:23 You must not lie carnally with any animal, thus defiling yourself with it; a woman must not stand before an animal to mate with it; that is a perversion.

    Leviticus 20:16 If a woman approaches any animal to mate with it, you must kill both the woman and the animal. They must surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.

    Full study and all 3 verses →
  • רְעוּת reûthfellow (-woman)translated this way 2 times of its 6 uses · Strong’s H7468Noun  ·  Translated: mate 2, neighbors 1, woman 1, another 1

    Isaiah 34:15 There the owl will make her nest; she will lay and hatch her eggs and gather her brood under her shadow. Even there the birds of prey will gather, each with its mate.

    Isaiah 34:16 Search and read the scroll of the LORD: Not one of these will go missing, not one will lack her mate, because He has ordered it by His mouth, and He will gather them by His Spirit.

    Full study and all 6 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.