a mourner: a person who is in mourning for the dead, marked out by it and waiting to be comforted
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
Hebrew keeps a small family of words for grief, and this one names the person. The verb (אָבַל) is the act of mourning, and the noun (אֵבֶל) is the mourning itself, its customs and its set number of days. This word is the one that lands on a human being: Jacob says he will go down to his son still mourning, and Haman hurries home mourning with his head covered.
Most often it stands on its own as a plain noun, "the mourners," a recognized group of people rather than a passing mood. And that group has a fixed partner in the Hebrew Bible: comfort. The two words travel together so consistently that the mourner is almost defined by the person coming toward him.
Job remembers being like a man who comforts mourners.
God says he will heal his people and pay out comfort to his mourners.
The year of the Lord's favor is announced in order to comfort all who mourn.
One verse turns the word on a place instead of a person. In Lamentations the roads to Zion are in mourning, emptied because nobody walks up them to the festivals anymore. A road that has gone quiet and slack is being pictured the way a grieving person looks, which is the same move the related verb makes when it says fields and farmland mourn as they dry out.
Nuances
1ain mourning: describing a particular person as given over to grief, with the outward signs that go with it
Gen 37:35Est 6:12
1ba mourner: the bereaved as a recognized group, the people others come to console
Job 29:25Psa 35:14Isa 57:18Isa 61:2Isa 61:3
1c(of roads and places) in mourning: gone silent and empty, pictured as a grieving figure
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested
Lam 1:4*
Lam 1:4
Whether the roads of Zion in Lamentations 1:4 are said to mourn, or whether the word here comes from a second, identically spelled root meaning to dry up and lie waste.
majorityOne word. This is the ordinary word for a mourner, applied to the deserted roads, and the picture of grief and the picture of emptiness are meant together.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אָבֵל; DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. אבל; Katherine M. Hayes, The Earth Mourns: Prophetic Metaphor and Oral Aesthetic (2002)
minorityTwo words. A separate root meaning "to dry up, be desolate," argued from cognate evidence, lies behind this use and the comparable prophetic texts about mourning land.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. אבל
names someone inside a recognized period of mourning with its own visible signs, a condition that other people are expected to answer with comfort.Job 29:25Isa 61:2
Both
both name the grieving person rather than the grief itself.Isa 57:18
Only mourner
in English a mourner is largely someone attending a funeral, a role that lasts an afternoon rather than a season of life.
Lands on a particular human being and describes him as grieving, so it can be said of one named person in one moment: Jacob refusing to be consoled over Joseph, or Haman hurrying home with his head covered.Gen 37:35Est 6:12
Names the bereaved as a recognized group of people, "the mourners," the ones others walk toward with comfort. Comfort is its steady partner: Job comforts them, God heals and comforts his, and the year of the Lord's favor is announced to comfort them.Job 29:25Psa 35:14Isa 57:18Isa 61:2
Can be turned on a place and picture it as a grieving figure: the roads up to Zion have gone silent and slack because nobody walks them to the festivals anymore.Lam 1:4
Both
Both belong to the same vocabulary of open, publicly displayed grief, the kind carried out with ashes and torn clothes rather than kept private. Isaiah 61:3 sets them side by side, the grieving of Zion and the grief that is being lifted off them.Isa 61:3
Neither one names a condition meant to last. In the same promise the grieving receive a crown in place of ashes and the grief itself is exchanged for the oil of gladness.Isa 61:3
Names the observance itself, something with a fixed length that can be counted and finished: seven days for Jacob at the threshing floor, thirty days for Moses on the plains of Moab.Gen 50:10Deu 34:8Gen 50:11
Because it is a state with a shape and an end, it can be swapped for its opposite. Feasts are turned into it, and it is turned back into gladness and a good day.Amo 8:10Est 9:22Jer 31:13Isa 60:20
Works as a setting or an occasion you can enter and even as the sound grief makes, so wisdom can weigh "the house of mourning" against the house of feasting and Job can say his harp has been retuned to it.Ecc 7:2Ecc 7:4Job 30:31
אָבַלthe verb of this family: to mourn, said both of grieving people and of land that droops and dries up.
Labels the grieving people themselves, so comfort can be promised straight to them: "his mourners" are healed, and the mourners of Zion are given a crown in place of ashes.Isa 57:18Isa 61:2Isa 61:3Job 29:25
Says what condition a person is in rather than what he is doing, a state he carries with him: Haman hurries home in mourning with his head covered, and Jacob expects to reach the grave still in it.Est 6:12Gen 37:35
Works as a ready comparison for how a grieving person looks and moves, the bowed and darkened bearing of someone "mourning" a mother.Psa 35:14
Both
Both cover the plain grief of a household over a death in the family, and Jacob's grief for Joseph is told with each in turn.Gen 37:342Sa 13:37Gen 37:35Psa 35:14
Both can put a place in mourning rather than a person, so the land itself and the roads to Zion are said to grieve when the people are gone.Isa 33:9Jer 14:2Lam 1:4
Names mourning as something being done, so it can be measured in days, cut short, or told to stop.1Sa 16:1Dan 10:2Ezk 7:12Neh 8:9
Describes a whole crowd going into mourning the moment bad news reaches them.Exo 33:4Num 14:391Sa 6:192Ch 35:24
Carries the picture of a countryside drying out, set right beside words for withering and shriveling, so the grief of the ground and the failure of its crops are one image.Isa 24:4Isa 24:7Hos 4:3Amo 1:2Jol 1:10
מִסְפֵּדthe loud public wailing at a death, the sound of grief, where this word is the person grieving rather than the noise.
It names the sound of grief, the loud wailing a whole community lets out, which fills open squares, rooftops, and vineyards.Amo 5:16Amo 5:17Jer 48:38
It is something people are summoned to and can hold at an appointed time, called for alongside fasting, shaved heads, and sackcloth.Isa 22:12Jol 2:12Est 4:3
It can be a practiced skill, so people who know how to wail are called in to do it, and its sound is compared to the howling of animals.Amo 5:16Mic 1:8
It gets measured and compared: a great and heavy one, a bitter one, one as intense as the wailing over an only child or at a famous national disaster.Gen 50:10Jer 6:26Ezk 27:31Zec 12:10Zec 12:11
אָבֵלAbel is a biblical name written exactly like אָבֵל, the common Hebrew word grouped here.
avel in the other biblical languages
πενθέωGreek“to mourn”the main Greek word for mourning grief; where Isaiah promises comfort to mourners, the Greek Bible says "those who mourn," the wording Jesus takes up in the Beatitudes.
It is a label you can hang on a person: "the mourners" as a recognized group in the community, the people others come to sit with. Job remembers being like a man who comforts mourners, and Isaiah speaks of the mourners of Zion as a standing company waiting for their turnaround.Job 29:25Isa 61:3Isa 57:18
It describes the visible condition a person is walking around in, not an activity being performed. Jacob says he will go down to his son still in mourning, and Haman hurries home in mourning with his head covered, the state itself being what the sentence reports.Gen 37:35Est 6:12Psa 35:14
It can be said of a place rather than a person. In Lamentations the roads up to Zion are in mourning, gone silent because nobody walks them to the festivals anymore. The Greek word is only ever used of people.Lam 1:4
Both
Both name the grief of the bereaved as something plainly visible in a household: Jacob refusing to be consoled over Joseph, and the disciples found mourning and weeping after the death of Jesus.Gen 37:35Mrk 16:10
Both come with comfort attached, and the Greek word is how the Greek Bible renders the Hebrew one in exactly that promise. Isaiah announces comfort for all who mourn, and Jesus picks the wording up again when he says the ones who mourn are the ones who will be comforted.Isa 61:2Mat 5:4
For both, mourning and celebration cannot share a room. The roads of Zion are in mourning because the crowds no longer come up to the feasts, and Jesus says wedding guests cannot mourn while the bridegroom is still with them.Lam 1:4Mat 9:15
It stretches past bereavement to grief over wrongdoing. Paul says the church should have been in mourning over the man it was tolerating, and he fears arriving to find people still unrepentant. James turns it into a command to a divided community: change your laughter to mourning. The Hebrew word never once names sorrow over sin.1Co 5:22Co 12:21Jas 4:9
It can be grief over a lost fortune rather than a lost person. When the great city burns, the traders and the shipowners who made their money from her stand at a distance and mourn, because nobody buys their cargo anymore.Rev 18:11Rev 18:15Rev 18:19
It can point forward to mourning that has not started yet, as a coming reversal. Jesus warns the people laughing now that they will mourn and weep later, and he tells his followers the days are coming when they will mourn. The Hebrew word only ever describes grief already underway.Luk 6:25Mat 9:15
What scholars say about avel
The lexica treat אָבֵל as the verbal adjective of אבל I "to mourn," and note that its dominant biblical use is substantival: BDB, HALOT and DCH all list Job 29:25,Ps 35:14,Isa 57:18 and Isa 61:2-3 under the substantive "mourner(s)," with the attributive use confined to Gen 37:35 and Est 6:12. The clustering with נחם "to comfort" in four of the eight occurrences is widely observed; Blenkinsopp treats the mourners of Isa 61:2-3 (and the "mourners of Zion") as a designation for a definable group within the post-exilic community rather than a general term for the sad, a reading with a long history in the study of Third Isaiah. Lam 1:4 is the contested occurrence: BDB and older treatments connect the mourning of ways and land to a proposed second root cognate with Akkadian abalu "to dry up," while HALOT, DCH and Hayes argue for a single polysemous root whose application to terrain trades on the overlap between a mourner's drooping posture and a parched, emptied landscape. TDOT (Baumann) surveys both positions. Because the adjective is confined to the human sense in seven of eight occurrences, the Lam 1:4 datum is usually adjudicated on the strength of the verbal evidence rather than on its own.
Sources
HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אָבֵלlexicon
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. אָבֵלlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. אבלlexicon
A. Baumann, "אבל," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 1:44-48dictionary
Katherine M. Hayes, The Earth Mourns: Prophetic Metaphor and Oral Aesthetic (2002)monograph
Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66, Anchor Bible 19B (2003)commentary