Word study

Slope

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • כָּתֵף kâthêphshoulder, shoulder-blade, sidetranslated this way 10 times of its 62 uses · Strong’s H3802Noun  ·  Translated: side 17, shoulders 9, shoulder 9, shoulder pieces 8

    Numbers 34:11 then go down from Shepham to Riblah on the east side of Ain and continue along the slopes east of the Sea of Chinnereth.

    Joshua 15:8 From there the border went up the Valley of Ben-hinnom along the southern slope of the Jebusites (that is, Jerusalem) and ascended to the top of the hill that faces the Valley of Hinnom on the west, at the northern end of the Valley of Rephaim.

    Full study and all 55 verses →
  • אֲשֵׁדָה ăshêdâhfoundationtranslated this way 6 times of its 6 uses · Strong’s H794Noun  ·  Translated: slopes 6

    Deuteronomy 3:17 The Jordan River in the Arabah bordered it from Chinnereth to the Sea of the Arabah (the Salt Sea) with the slopes of Pisgah to the east.

    Joshua 10:40 So Joshua conquered the whole region— the hill country, the Negev, the foothills, and the slopes, together with all their kings— leaving no survivors. He devoted to destruction everything that breathed, just as the LORD, the God of Israel, had commanded.

    Full study and all 6 verses →
  • מוֹרָד môrâddescent, slopetranslated this way 2 times of its 5 uses · Strong’s H4174Noun  ·  Translated: slopes 1, along the descent 1, beveled 1, descent 1

    Joshua 7:5 And the men of Ai struck down about thirty-six of them, chasing them from the gate as far as the quarries and striking them down on the slopes. So the hearts of the people melted and became like water.

    Micah 1:4 The mountains will melt beneath Him, and the valleys will split apart, like wax before the fire, like water rushing down a slope.

    Full study and all 5 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.