Word study

Soil

4 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word

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

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • אֲדָמָה ădâmâhground, landtranslated this way 13 times of its 220 uses · Strong’s H127Noun  ·  Translated: land 121, ground 38, earth 34, soil 12

    Genesis 4:2 Later she gave birth to Cain’s brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, while Cain was a tiller of the soil.

    Exodus 23:19 Bring the best of the firstfruits of your soil to the house of the LORD your God. You must not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk.

    Full study and all 207 verses →
  • עָפָר âphârdry earth, dusttranslated this way 6 times of its 110 uses · Strong’s H6083Noun  ·  Translated: dust 73, soil 6, like dust 5, like the dust 3

    Job 14:8 If its roots grow old in the ground and its stump dies in the soil,

    Isaiah 34:7 And the wild oxen will fall with them, the young bulls with the strong ones. Their land will be drenched with blood, and their soil will be soaked with fat.

    Full study and all 103 verses →
  • אֶרֶץ eretsearth, landtranslated this way 3 times of its 2,375 uses · Strong’s H776Noun  ·  Translated: land 1,483, earth 564, ground 119, lands 41Full study and all 2,120 verses →
  • שָׂדֶה sâdehid.translated this way 2 times of its 317 uses · Strong’s H7704Noun  ·  Translated: field 185, fields 55, land 19, wild 13Full study and all 299 verses →

Greek words (New Testament)

  • γῆ gēthe earth, soil, landtranslated this way 13 times of its 238 uses · Strong’s G1093Noun  ·  Translated: earth 156, land 37, ground 19, soil 13

    Matthew 13:5 Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.

    Mark 4:5 Some fell on rocky ground, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly because the soil was shallow.

    Full study and all 217 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.