Word study

Oversee

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • פְּקֻדָּה pequddâhoversight, mustering, visitation, storetranslated this way 1 time of its 30 uses · Strong’s H6486Noun  ·  Translated: punishment 8, oversight 2

    Numbers 4:16 Eleazar son of Aaron the priest shall oversee the oil for the light, the fragrant incense, the daily grain offering, and the anointing oil. He has oversight of the entire tabernacle and everything in it, including the holy objects and their utensils.”

    Full study and all 29 verses →
  • נָצַח nâtsachbe pre-eminent, enduringtranslated this way 1 time of its 63 uses · Strong’s H5329Verb  ·  Translated: choirmaster 56, supervisors 2, supervise 2, lead the music 1

    1 Chronicles 23:4 “Of these,” said David, “24,000 are to oversee the work of the house of the LORD, 6,000 are to be officers and judges,

    Full study and all 63 verses →
  • פָּקַד pâqadattend to, visit, muster, appointtranslated this way 1 time of its 294 uses · Strong’s H6485Verb  ·  Translated: punish 41, numbered 26, appointed 15, counted 14

    2 Chronicles 34:12 And the men did the work faithfully. The Levites overseeing them were Jahath and Obadiah, descendants of Merari, and Zechariah and Meshullam, descendants of Kohath. Other Levites, all skilled with musical instruments,

    Full study and all 267 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.