Word study
Tonight
3 Hebrew words behind this English word
The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with “tonight”. 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 “tonight” or one of its forms.
Compare the Hebrew words side by side
Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)
- לַיִל layiltwist, night, adversitytranslated this way 9 times of its 222 uses · Strong’s H3915Noun · Translated: night 188, nights 14, tonight 9Full study and all 213 verses →
Genesis 19:34 The next day the older daughter said to the younger, “Look, I slept with my father last night. Let us get him drunk with wine again tonight so you can go in and sleep with him and we can preserve our father’s line.”
Joshua 2:2 And it was reported to the king of Jericho: “Behold, some men of Israel have come here tonight to spy out the land.”
- אֵל êlmotion totranslated this way 1 time of its 4,199 uses · Strong’s H413Preposition · Translated: to 1,941, to me 285, to you 149, to him 137Full study and all 3,455 verses →
Genesis 19:5 They called out to Lot, saying, “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Send them out to us so we can have relations with them!”
- לוּן lûnlodge, pass the nighttranslated this way 1 time of its 80 uses · Strong’s H3885Verb · Translated: spend the night 17, spent the night 7, grumbled 7, remain 6Full study and all 76 verses →
Ruth 3:13 Stay here tonight, and in the morning, if he wants to redeem you, good. Let him redeem you. But if he does not want to redeem you, as surely as the LORD lives, I will. Now lie here until morning.”
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.