A Student’s

Vocabulary

for

BIBLICAL

HEBREW

AND

ARAMAIC

Larry A. Mitchel

grand rapids, michigan 49530

A Student’s Vocabulary for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic

Copyright © 1984 by Zondervan

Requests for information should be addressed to:

Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49530

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchel, Larry A.

A student’s vocabulary for biblical Hebrew and Aramaic.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-10: 0-310-45461-1

ISBN-13: 978-0-310-45461-8

1. Hebrew language–Word frequency. 2. Hebrew language—Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. 3. Aramaic language—Glossaries, vocabularies, etc. 4. Bible O.T.—Language, style. I. Title.

PJ4845.M5 19842082.A9 M485—2001

221.4′.4

84—5219

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

To Leona Glidden Running for whom

Semitic languages are a consuming and contagious interest.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

HOW TO USE THIS STUDENT’S VOCABULARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

TABLE OF VALUES

ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS

SECTION 1: HEBREW WORDS OCCURRING MORE THAN 500 TIMES

SECTION 2: HEBREW WORDS OCCURRING 500–200 TIMES

SECTION 3: HEBREW WORDS OCCURRING 199–100 TIMES

SECTION 4: HEBREW WORDS OCCURRING 99–50 TIMES

SECTION 5: HEBREW WORDS OCCURRING 49–10 TIMES

SECTION 6: ARAMAIC VOCABULARY

INDEX

PREFACE

Purpose of this Student’s Vocabulary

In light of the availability of a number of Hebrew vocabulary lists, it is proper to ask why another such list should be put in print. The volumes that first come to mind each make a real contribution. George M. Landes’s A Student’s Vocabulary of Biblical Hebrew has an obvious advantage in its grouping of Hebrew words by root, a helpful aid in learning vocabulary. The Hebrew Vocabularies of J. Barton Payne present the Hebrew particles in a particularly helpful way. And the small volume by John D. W. Watts (Lists of Words Occurring Frequently in the Hebrew Bible.), which like Payne’s is based on William Rainey Harper’s Hebrew Vocabularies (published in 1890), presents Hebrew vocabulary down to 25 occurrences in a very compact form.

However, in my experience in teaching biblical Hebrew on the undergraduate level, I have felt that each of the above excellent works have presented two fundamental problems for entry-level Hebrew students: (1) each volume incorporates a number of separate lists, requiring reference to various parts of the book in order to find all Hebrew words of a given frequency; and (2) the lists themselves are apparently set by somewhat arbitrary word-frequency limits, resulting in lists of greatly variable length. The present work seeks to remedy both of those basic problems.

The lexicon of Old Testament Hebrew contains some 10,000 words in all. Of these, approximately 740 occur fifty times or more. A full 490 occur as hapax ...