To navigate back up to the Hebrew index, see index-hebrew. This page was originally written in March 2017.
Consider, for a minute, the Hebrew word hgh. If you’re reading along in the Psalm 1:2, you will come across it. But rather, he delights in the torah of Yahweh, and in/about his torah he hgh-s day and night. One might imagine, from this usage alone, something like “study” or “recite” or “read” or “think.” The King James Version has “meditate” in this verse.
If you use the nifty tool Bible Online Learner, you can hover your mouse over YHGH (a yiqtol[1] form of HGH), and it’ll give you some information about the word. Among other things, you’ll find that it occurs 25 times in the Bible. It’ll give you glosses for the word: “coo, growl, mutter.” But this can’t be the whole story. The Psalm is talking about the behavior of a commendable non-wicked person. I’m not sure how much sense it makes to say that a good man is one who coos, growls, or mutters in Yahweh’s torah day and night. You could, I suppose, think of the man reading and sort of muttering or quietly reading to himself.
Another place you could go to find out about hgh is Blue Letter Bible. This is an extensive but sometimes outdated or unreliable site. It combines a lot of information from a variety of sources with varying levels of reliability. It’s best features are its concordance functions and the Gesenius Lexicon [with bracketed comments by Tregelles, who is mostly unhelpful].
Its concordance function allows you to quickly see all the uses of the word in the Bible. Unfortunately, because it is not always clear in the Hebrew Bible which word is what, you will occasionally see a verse or two that does not belong on the list, or miss a verse or two that does belong on the list. In this case, you can compare what you saw on the Bible Online Learner site (25 uses) with the number given at Blue Letter Bible (25 uses). The agreement of the two is a good sign.
Next, Blue Letter Bible contains several dictionary-type entries for the word. Ignore the Strong’s definition. Strong’s is a low-quality source of information about meanings of words, and is often misleading. Ignore the “Outline of Biblical Usage,” or just glance at it quickly without taking it too seriously. I can’t vouch for it.
Below those two, you’ll find “Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon.” This is good stuff, a classic of Hebrew lexicography. It is old, and Gesenius did have a tendency to be way overconfident about the meanings of obscure words, but it’s worth a careful reading. In particular, Gesenius will break down the different meanings of a verbal root based on the binyanim[2] it appears in.
In this case, yhgh is a qal form of the verb. If this didn’t jump out at you immediately, you could confirm this at Bible Online Learner by clicking on it. In any case, back to Gesenius. Because we’re looking for a qal form, we can ignore piel and hiphil. Gesenius has a pretty big entry for this verb, which I’ll strip down for you here, just the qal:
(1) to murmur, to mutter, to growl.
(2) poetically, to speak, utter sound, to sing, to celebrate.
(3) to meditate (think, possibly aloud, to oneself), and thus to remember, to plot, to plan, to devise.
Next, you can look the word up over at SDBH, the up-to-date Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. They have an entry for HGH. They provide a range of meanings similar to those of Gesenius, and even break down exactly which meanings they find in which verses.
In this case, SDBH gives the following definition for the meaning of the word found in eleven verses, including this one: “action whereby humans speaks [sic] softly for themselves as if thinking out load [sic].” This is the cool thing about SDBH. It doesn’t just give you glosses. It gives you full, dictionary-style definitions, which is helpful because specific Hebrew phrases don’t map perfectly onto specific English phrases.
Translation is always a bit of a balancing act, and is rarely perfectly precise. Of course, we can’t just translate the verse like this:
But rather, in Yahweh’s torah he delights, and in his torah he carries out the action whereby humans speak softly to themselves as if thinking out loud.
That’s a surefire way to really mess up a translation of a poetic passage. So we gotta try something roughly equivalent. “He recites his torah day and night,” “he studies his Torah day and night,” “he meditates on his Torah day and night,” etc. I’d prefer “studies,” myself. Maybe.
Notes