Word study

Oak

4 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • אֵלָה êlâhterebinthtranslated this way 10 times of its 13 uses · Strong’s H424Noun  ·  Translated: oak 6, oak tree 3, terebinth 2, tree 1

    Genesis 35:4 So they gave Jacob all their foreign gods and all their earrings, and Jacob buried them under the oak near Shechem.

    Judges 6:11 Then the angel of the LORD came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to hide it from the Midianites.

    Full study and all 12 verses →
  • אֵלוֹן êlônterebinthtranslated this way 8 times of its 9 uses · Strong’s H436Noun  ·  Translated: Oak 5, near the oaks 2, Oaks 1, great tree 1

    Genesis 12:6 Abram traveled through the land as far as the site of the Oak of Moreh at Shechem. And at that time the Canaanites were in the land.

    Deuteronomy 11:30 Are not these mountains across the Jordan, west of the road toward the sunset, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah opposite Gilgal near the Oak of Moreh?

    Full study and all 9 verses →
  • אַלּוֹן allônoaktranslated this way 8 times of its 8 uses · Strong’s H437Noun  ·  Translated: oak 4, oaks 4

    Genesis 35:8 Now Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died and was buried under the oak below Bethel. So Jacob named it Allon-bacuth.

    Isaiah 2:13 against all the cedars of Lebanon, lofty and lifted up, against all the oaks of Bashan,

    Full study and all 8 verses →
  • אַיִל ayilramtranslated this way 3 times of its 178 uses · Strong’s H352Noun  ·  Translated: ram 89, rams 59, side pillars 12, like rams 3

    Isaiah 1:29 Surely you will be ashamed of the sacred oaks in which you have delighted; you will be embarrassed by the gardens that you have chosen.

    Isaiah 57:5 who burn with lust among the oaks, under every luxuriant tree, who slaughter your children in the valleys, under the clefts of the rocks?

    Full study and all 169 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.

What the Bible says about oak: passages by topic →

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.