StrongerBible

galmud

גַּלְמוּד

HebrewH1565“barren, gaunt, ...”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Job 3:7Job 15:34Job 30:3Isa 49:21
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradegal-MOODadjective

What galmud means

barren: hard and bare, and so yielding nothing at all

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

This is a rare word. It turns up only four times in the whole Hebrew Bible, three of them in Job, a book famous for reaching after hard and unusual vocabulary. The picture behind it is hard, bare, stony ground, the kind of ground that takes in nothing and grows nothing. An Arabic word built from the same consonants means "boulder" or "hard stony land," and that image fits every biblical use: something that yields nothing at all.

The four subjects it describes are strikingly different, and the one image stretches over all of them:

  • a night that brings no birth, and so hears no shout of joy (Job 3:7)
  • a crowd of godless people that bears no fruit and comes to nothing (Job 15:34)
  • outcasts shriveled and wasted by hunger and famine (Job 30:3)
  • a mother stripped of her children, standing beside the word for a woman bereaved of them (שַׁכּוּל), with none left to bear (Isaiah 49:21)

English Bibles can look as though they are translating four different words here ("barren," "desolate," "gaunt," "solitary"), but the variety comes from matching one picture to four very unlike subjects, not from the word carrying a wide range of meanings.

The "solitary" of older English versions is a later arrival. In the Hebrew of the rabbis, and in Hebrew today, the word does mean "lonely," and Jerome's Latin Bible had already rendered it that way in Job 3:7, which is where the King James Version got it. Within the Bible itself the idea of being alone is carried by other words: in the very verse in Isaiah, "I was left all alone" uses a different word meaning "apart, by oneself" (בַּד).

Nuances

1ayielding nothing: barren, fruitless, bringing forth neither child nor produce
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
Job 3:7Job 15:34Isa 49:21
Job 15:34

Whether the word at Job 15:34 describes the company of the godless as barren, or names that company as barrenness itself.

  • majorityIt describes the company: the assembly of the godless is barren, producing nothing, which matches the burned tents of the next line and the conceiving and bearing of the verse after.; HALOT, s.v. גַּלְמוּד
  • minorityIt stands as a noun: the company of the godless is barrenness, a barren thing.; BDB, s.v. גַּלְמוּד ("of company of wicked men, where probably a substantive")
1bdried up by hunger: shriveled and gaunt
CertaintyObscure
Job 30:3

What scholars say about galmud

BDB glosses גַּלְמוּד "hard, barren" and treats the biblical uses as mostly figurative (a barren night, Job 3:7; a barren company of the wicked, 15:34, "where probably a substantive"; the stiff or lifeless famine-stricken, 30:3; exiled Zion as a bereaved and barren woman, Isa 49:21), explicitly assigning the "lonely" gloss to Late (Rabbinic) Hebrew rather than to biblical usage. HALOT agrees with "hard, barren," and Gesenius classifies the form as quadriliteral, "hard" and hence "sterile, properly of hard stony ground," on the strength of Arabic jalmūd ("rock, boulder, hard stony ground"), which BDB likewise cites alongside an Aramaic form. Strong's "desolate, solitary" reflects later Hebrew and the King James tradition rather than the primary biblical sense. The traditional derivation is from גלם ("to roll or wrap up"), attested in the verb at 2 Kings 2:8 and in the noun גֹּלֶם at Psalm 139:16; scholars divide over whether the final ד is a root consonant (an independent four-consonant base shared with or borrowed from Arabic) or a formative element added to גלם. The ancient versions had no fixed equivalent, which is itself evidence that the sense was already unclear in antiquity: the Greek of Job, notably free and about a sixth shorter than the Masoretic text, gives ὀδύνη at 3:7, paraphrases at 15:34, and ἄγονος at 30:3, while Isaiah 49:21 has ἄτεκνος καὶ χήρα; the Vulgate alternates solitaria (Job 3:7) with sterilis (Job 15:34; 30:3; Isa 49:21). Where the versions converge, at Job 30:3 and Isaiah 49:21, they converge on "childless, barren," which supports that as the older understanding. Jastrow documents the Rabbinic sense "lonely, melancholy" (Sotah 42a; Rosh Hashanah 26a; Genesis Rabbah 34), which became standard in Modern Hebrew and which philologically minded commentators judge anachronistic for Job and Isaiah. The Arabic comparison was pressed by Schultens and Umbreit and later by the broader comparative school of G. R. Driver, D. Winton Thomas and Dahood; Barr's Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968) is the classic caution against cognate-driven glossing of rare words, although for this word the consonantal and semantic correspondence is unusually secure. The commonly assumed Ugaritic cognate is a false lead: ġlm and ġlmt ("lad, maiden") begin with ghayin, which answers to Hebrew ʿayin, so they belong with עֶלֶם and עַלְמָה rather than with גַּלְמוּד. No occurrence in the non-biblical Qumran material or in the Hebrew fragments of Ben Sira is reported in the standard lexica.

Where scholars disagree about galmud

Whether the biblical sense of the word is "hard, barren" or the traditional "solitary, desolate."

  • majorityThe word means hard and therefore barren or unproductive. All four biblical uses fit that sense, and "lonely, solitary" belongs to later Hebrew rather than to biblical usage.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גַּלְמוּד; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גַּלְמוּד; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. גַּלְמוּד
  • minorityThe traditional rendering "solitary, desolate," carried into English by the King James Version, resting on Jerome's Latin at Job 3:7 and on the sense the word bears in Rabbinic and Modern Hebrew.; Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, #1565 ("desolate, solitary"); Jerome, Vulgate, Job 3:7 (solitaria)
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

  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גַּלְמוּדlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. גַּלְמוּדlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. גַּלְמוּדlexicon
  • Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (1903), s.v. גַּלְמוּדlexicon
  • James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968)monograph
  • G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, s.v. ġlm, ġlmtlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20 (Word Biblical Commentary 17), 1989commentary
  • Marvin H. Pope, Job (Anchor Bible 15), 3rd ed., 1973commentary
  • John Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40-55 (International Critical Commentary), 2006commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Bible 19A), 2002commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of גַּלְמוּד

m s absolute

גַּלְמוּד

Job 3:7, Job 15:34, Job 30:3

f s absolute

גַלְמוּדָה

Isa 49:21