Word study
Pursuit
3 Hebrew words behind this English word
The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: pursuit, pursuits. 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 “pursuit” or one of its forms.
Compare the Hebrew words side by side
Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)
- רָדַף râdaphpursue, chase, persecutetranslated this way 13 times of its 142 uses · Strong’s H7291Verb · Translated: pursued 36, pursue 35, pursues 9, pursuers 9Full study and all 135 verses →
Genesis 14:14 And when Abram heard that his relative had been captured, he mobilized the 318 trained men born in his household, and they set out in pursuit as far as Dan.
Joshua 2:7 So the king’s men set out in pursuit of the spies along the road to the fords of the Jordan, and as soon as they had gone out, the gate was shut.
- רְעוּת reûthlonging, strivingtranslated this way 7 times of its 7 uses · Strong’s H7469Noun · Translated: pursuit 7Full study and all 7 verses →
Ecclesiastes 1:14 I have seen all the things that are done under the sun, and have found them all to be futile, a pursuit of the wind.
Ecclesiastes 2:11 Yet when I considered all the works that my hands had accomplished and what I had toiled to achieve, I found everything to be futile, a pursuit of the wind; there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
- רַעְיוֹן rayônid.translated this way 2 times of its 3 uses · Strong’s H7475Noun · Translated: pursuit 2, striving 1Full study and all 3 verses →
Ecclesiastes 1:17 So I set my mind to know wisdom and madness and folly; I learned that this, too, is a pursuit of the wind.
Ecclesiastes 4:16 There is no limit to all the people who were before them. Yet the successor will not be celebrated by those who come even later. This too is futile and a pursuit of the wind.
How to study a word well
- 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.
- 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.
- Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
- 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.
- See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
- Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
- 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.