bayit

בַּיִת

HebrewH1004“house, household, ...”

Appears 2049 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 6:14Gen 7:1Gen 12:1Gen 12:15Gen 12:17Gen 14:14Gen 15:2Gen 15:3Gen 17:12Gen 17:13Gen 17:23 (2×)Gen 17:27 (2×)Gen 18:19Gen 19:2Gen 19:3Gen 19:4Gen 19:10Gen 19:11Gen 20:13Gen 20:18Gen 24:2Gen 24:7Gen 24:23Gen 24:27Gen 24:28Gen 24:31Gen 24:32Gen 24:38Gen 24:40Gen 27:15Gen 28:2Gen 29:13Gen 30:30Gen 31:37Gen 31:41Gen 33:17Gen 34:29Gen 34:30Gen 35:2Gen 36:6Gen 39:4Gen 39:5 (2×)Gen 39:8Gen 39:9Gen 39:11 (3×)Gen 39:14Gen 40:14Gen 41:40Gen 43:16Gen 43:17

Names & words formed with this

Word studyResearch-gradeBAH-yitnoun

What bayit means

house: a bounded, enclosed space and, by extension, the people, the family line, the temple, or the place it holds together.

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

At its root this word names an enclosed space and what that space contains. From the four walls of a dwelling, the meaning reaches outward in every direction the English word "house" also travels, and several it does not. The people who share the dwelling are the household; their descendants over time are the family line; a whole people can be one "house" ("the house of Israel"); the building set apart for God is his house; even a small box that holds something, or simply the inside of a thing, can be its "house."

These are not separate words that happen to be spelled alike. They are one picture scaled up and down: a defined, contained whole with an ordered life inside it. The same image fits a single family under one roof, a clan, a royal line, a nation, and the temple where God is said to live. That is why a single Hebrew sentence can slide from the building to the family in it without missing a step, and why "the house of David" can mean the palace, the ruling dynasty, or the living relatives depending only on the surrounding words.

The reach goes past anything English "house" carries. A grave can be called a person's "eternal house," the place appointed for everyone who lives. A town takes its name from the god worshipped there, so Bethel means "house of God." A tent, by contrast, is not this word but its opposite number, the movable dwelling (אֹהֶל) set against the settled, built one; a palace or grand temple hall has its own imposing word (הֵיכָל); and God's portable sanctuary in the wilderness is the tabernacle (מִשְׁכָּן), not the ordinary house.

Because the spread is so wide, no single English word covers it, and translators choose by context: "house" for the building, "household" or "family" for the people, "dynasty" or "line" for the descendants, "temple" for God's house, "box" or "holder" for the container uses, and plain "inside" for the interior of a thing. The Greek οἶκος carries much of the same range, which is why it so often stands in for this word.

Nuances

1aa house or dwelling as a physical building, the place where a person or family lives.

TranslatabilityDirect

Gen 19:4Gen 33:17Exo 12:7Lev 14:35Deu 6:11Deu 8:12Jos 2:15Pro 24:3Isa 5:9Isa 65:21Jer 29:5Amo 3:15

1ba household or family: the people who live together as one domestic unit, the "father's house," often including servants and dependents.

Gen 7:1Gen 12:1Gen 17:23 (2×)Gen 18:19Gen 20:13Gen 45:11Gen 50:8Exo 12:3Exo 12:4Num 12:7Jos 24:15Rut 4:11

1ca dynasty or family line: descendants reckoned across generations, as in "the house of David."

Exo 2:1Exo 6:14Rut 4:121Sa 20:162Sa 3:12Sa 3:62Sa 7:112Sa 7:132Sa 7:161Ki 12:191Ki 13:22Ki 9:8

1da whole people or nation as one household: "the house of Israel," "the house of Judah," the covenant community addressed as a single family.

Exo 16:31Exo 19:3Exo 40:38Lev 10:6Lev 17:3Isa 5:7Jer 11:10Jer 31:31Ezk 2:5Ezk 3:1Ezk 12:2Amo 5:25

1ethe temple, the house of the LORD; and likewise the palace, the house of the king.

Gen 28:171Ki 6:11Ki 8:131Ki 9:1Est 1:9Psa 23:6Psa 27:4Psa 84:10Psa 122:1Isa 2:3Amo 7:13Hag 1:4

1fa container, box, or holder: a small enclosure made to hold something.

TranslatabilityDirect

Exo 25:27Exo 26:29Exo 30:4Exo 36:34Exo 37:14Exo 37:27Exo 38:51Ki 18:32Job 8:14Job 8:15Isa 3:20

1gthe inside or interior of something: the space within, often paired with a word meaning "within" or "inward."

Gen 6:14Exo 25:11Exo 26:33Exo 28:26Exo 37:2Exo 39:19Lev 16:2Lev 16:12Lev 16:15Num 18:71Ki 6:151Ki 7:31

1ha place or location, especially the first element of a place name (Beth-).

Jos 13:172Sa 15:172Ki 9:27Neh 3:16Job 38:20Pro 8:2Isa 15:2Ezk 27:14Ezk 38:6Ezk 41:9Amo 5:6Amo 7:10

What bayit does not mean

Do not lock the word to the English word "house." The same word carries the building, the family living in it, a royal line stretching across generations, a whole people ("the house of Israel"), the temple, a container or box, and even the plain inside of something. "The house of David" almost never means a building: depending on the sentence it is the dynasty, the ruling family, or the kingdom. When a verse says God will build someone a "house," the gift is usually descendants, not architecture. And when God's temple is called his "house," the point is not that the everywhere-present God is boxed into a building; the word says the temple is his home and meeting place, not that heaven can be contained (as Solomon himself protests at the temple's dedication). Reading "building" into every occurrence flattens a word whose whole point is the ordered unit, not the walls.

What scholars say about bayit

The standard lexicons (HALOT, BDB, DCH) and the theological dictionaries (TDOT, NIDOTTE, TWOT) treat this as a single very common noun whose core sense is a bounded dwelling, fanning out into a recognized graded set of senses: the household or family who live in it (the technical plural "houses of the fathers" in the Priestly and Chronistic material); the descendants or dynasty (the idiomatic "house of X," as "house of David"); the corporate people ("house of Israel," over eighty times in Ezekiel, often "rebellious house"); the temple as the house of God and, similarly, the palace as the house of the king; a container or receptacle (the sockets for the carrying poles of the tabernacle furniture, Exodus 25 through 39, and the "perfume boxes" of Isaiah 3:20); the interior or inside of an object; and the first element of many place names (Beth-). The word is Proto-Semitic *bayt-, with cognates across the family (Akkadian bitu, Ugaritic bt, Aramaic, Arabic bayt); Hoffner's TDOT article is the reference synthesis. Scholars stress that the polysemy is not a bag of unrelated meanings but one organizing image scaled up and down, from the Iron Age four-room house through the joint household, clan, dynasty, and covenant people to the temple as YHWH's residence. Lawrence Stager's reconstruction of the "father's house" (beth-av) as the basic cell of Israelite society, correlated with the archaeological four-room house, reoriented the field, and J. David Schloen's patrimonial-household model gives the fullest theoretical statement of the single-template reading. The temple use has generated large discussion: Victor Hurowitz set Solomon's temple within the ancient Near Eastern temple-building genre, while the Deuteronomic "place the LORD will choose to cause his name to dwell there" prompted Moshe Weinfeld's name-theology thesis, since qualified by Sandra Richter's demonstration that the phrase is a borrowed royal formula for claiming a site. The most theologically weighted single use is the sustained wordplay of 2 Samuel 7, where David proposes to build God a house (temple) and God promises instead to build David a house (dynasty). The extra-biblical "house of David" (byt dwd) on the Tel Dan Stele is accepted by the mainstream of Semitic epigraphy as the earliest inscriptional witness to the Davidic dynasty. The many place-name entries are this same word used as the first element of a compound name.

Where scholars disagree about bayit

Whether the word's full range reflects one unified social concept operating at every scale (the patrimonial "house of the father" as a single template running from household through dynasty and nation to the temple), or a looser radial set of related-but-distinct senses that should not be collapsed into a single social theory.

majorityThe whole range is one concept scaled up and down: society is a nested hierarchy of households, so the same word names the family, the lineage, the kingdom, and the divine house without shifting its underlying sense.; J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol (Eisenbrauns, 2001); Philip J. King and Lawrence E. Stager, Life in Biblical Israel (Westminster John Knox, 2001)
minorityThe single-template reading overreaches: it forces complex evidence into one mold and underplays the parallel maternal networks ("house of the mother"), so the range is better read as related but distinct senses.; Daniel E. Fleming, "Schloen's Patrimonial Pyramid," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 328 (2002): 73-80; Cynthia R. Chapman, The House of the Mother (Yale University Press, 2016)

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. ביתlexicon
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. ביתlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. ביתlexicon
Harry A. Hoffner, "בַּיִת," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 2:107-116dictionary
Edwin C. Hostetter, "בַּיִת," in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE) 1:655-657dictionary
R. Laird Harris et al., eds., "בַּיִת," in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT), entry 241dictionary
Lawrence E. Stager, "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 260 (1985): 1-35article
J. David Schloen, The House of the Father as Fact and Symbol: Patrimonialism in Ugarit and the Ancient Near East (Eisenbrauns, 2001)monograph
Victor Hurowitz, I Have Built You an Exalted House: Temple Building in the Bible in Light of Mesopotamian and Northwest Semitic Writings (JSOTSup 115, 1992)monograph
Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford University Press, 1972)monograph
Sandra L. Richter, The Deuteronomistic History and the Name Theology: leshakken shemo sham in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (BZAW 318, de Gruyter, 2002)monograph
Avraham Biran and Joseph Naveh, "An Aramaic Stele Fragment from Tel Dan," Israel Exploration Journal 43 (1993): 81-98article

bayit

What bayit means

house: a bounded, enclosed space and, by extension, the people, the family line, the temple, or the place it holds together.

Nuances

What scholars say about bayit

Where scholars disagree about bayit

Sources

All attested forms of בַּיִת

m s construct

m s absolute

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m p absolute

m s construct

m p construct

m s construct

m p construct

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m p construct

m s construct

m p construct

m s construct

noun

m p construct

m p construct

m p construct

m s construct

What bayit means

house: a bounded, enclosed space and, by extension, the people, the family line, the temple, or the place it holds together.

Nuances

Related words

The English words used to translate bayit

How bayit differs from similar Hebrew words

bayit in the other biblical languages

What scholars say about bayit

Where scholars disagree about bayit

Sources

All attested forms of בַּיִת

m s construct

m s absolute

m s construct

m s construct

m p absolute

m s construct

m p construct

m s construct

m p construct

m p construct

m p construct

m s construct

m p construct

m s construct

noun

m p construct

m p construct

m p construct

m s construct