StrongerBible

gat

גַּת

HebrewH1660“winepress”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jdg 6:11Neh 13:15Isa 63:2Lam 1:15Jol 3:13(4:13)
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Word studyResearch-gradeGAHTnoun

What gat means

a winepress: the shallow rock basin where grapes were trodden underfoot at harvest, with the juice running off into a deeper vat alongside

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

A biblical winepress is not a machine. It is a hollow cut into bedrock, a few paces across and only shin deep, where the grape harvest was piled and trampled barefoot. A short channel carried the juice into a deeper pit beside it, and Hebrew gives that lower pit a name of its own (יֶקֶב). This word names the upper floor, the place where the treading actually happened, though biblical writers do not always keep the two words strictly apart.

Only two of the five uses are plain description. Gideon is beating out wheat down inside one of these basins, which is a poor place for the job and exactly the point: he is hiding. Nehemiah walks through Judah at vintage time and finds people treading the presses on the Sabbath.

The other three turn the basin into a picture. Treading grapes is loud, violent work that stains everything it splashes a deep red, so the prophets reached for it to describe God crushing a people:

  • In Lamentations the Lord treads the winepress, and the harvest being crushed underfoot is Judah herself.
  • In Isaiah a figure comes back from Edom with his clothing spattered red, as though he had been treading grapes, having trampled the nations with no one beside him.
  • In Joel the press is full and the vats are overflowing because the wickedness of the nations is ripe for harvest.

The Greek Old Testament rendered this word with one steady counterpart (ληνός), and that word carries the picture into Revelation, where the nations are thrown into "the great winepress of the wrath of God."

Nuances

1athe installation itself: the rock-cut floor at a vineyard where grapes were trodden
Jdg 6:11Neh 13:15
1bthe winepress as a picture of God crushing a people in judgment
Isa 63:2Lam 1:15Jol 3:13(4:13)

Disputed

Whether the word denotes only the upper treading basin, as distinct from the lower collecting vat, or can stand for the whole two-part installation.

  • majorityIt names the upper treading floor specifically, paired with the lower vat as the two components of one installation, a distinction confirmed by Joel 3:13 and by Iron Age rock-cut installations.; W. Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti (Leipzig, 1829-1858), 619b; F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 387-88; M. Ottosson, "יֶקֶב yeqeb," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament VI (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990); G. Dalman, Arbeit und Sitte in Palastina IV: Brot, Ol und Wein (Gutersloh, 1935), 354-413
  • minorityThe term already broadens to cover the whole installation, with the older word for the lower vat giving way to another term, a drift traceable from biblical into later Hebrew.; R. Frankel, Wine and Oil Production in Antiquity in Israel and Other Mediterranean Countries, JSOT/ASOR Monographs 10 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999)
  • contestedBiblical writers are simply not consistently technical, so the vocabulary should be described from usage rather than forced into a fixed pair.; D. J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew II (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 373; W. A. VanGemeren, ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997), §3676

What scholars say about gat

The lexica are unanimous on the basic gloss: BDB, HALOT, and DCH all give a feminine noun for a wine press or wine vat, attested five times (Judg 6:11; Neh 13:15; Isa 63:2; Lam 1:15; Joel 4:13 [ET 3:13]), with the plural גִּתּוֹת only at Neh 13:15. Gesenius specifies the trough in which grapes were trodden, whence the juice flowed into an adjacent יֶקֶב, and HALOT follows him while cautioning with Dalman and Frankel that the terms are not always kept strictly distinct; DCH declines etymological speculation and lists the collocations with דָּרַךְ, מָלֵא, and חבט. There is no dedicated TDOT article, but Ottosson's entry on יֶקֶב treats the pair together and takes Joel 4:13 as the locus classicus for the two-component installation, which Frankel's catalogue of some 3,700 rock-cut installations grounds materially, as do Borowski and Walsh. Etymology is unsettled: the traditional derivation from an unattested root יגן "to press" (BDB, HALOT, Klein) rests on Arabic wagana alone, which Kogan judges too remote, so most now treat the word as a primary noun. The strongest comparative evidence is Ugaritic gt, which in the economic texts denotes a rural estate or crown production center (Heltzer; DUL3 310-13); del Olmo Lete and Zamora argue that "farmstead" is the original value and the Hebrew "wine press" sense a Canaanite specialization, a case supported by the gt-toponym pattern that also yields Philistine Gath, whose Amarna name Gimtu/Gintu matches the reconstructed *gint- form (Rainey; Na'aman; Maeir). On the biblical texts, Boling and Sasson read Judg 6:11 as programmatic irony, Williamson and Blenkinsopp set Neh 13:15 in the Sabbath-commerce campaign, Hillers, Dobbs-Allsopp, and Berlin treat Lam 1:15 as the pivot into the wine-of-wrath tradition, Goldingay, Blenkinsopp, Childs, and Paul work Isa 63:1-6 (where commentators take גַּת and פּוּרָה as stylistic synonyms), and Wolff, Barton, Nogalski, and Assis read Joel 4:13 as literarily dependent on Isa 63. The LXX renders the word ληνός in all five places and יֶקֶב normally ὑπολήνιον, transmitting the distinction to Greek; Aune, Beale, and Koester trace Rev 14:19-20 and 19:15 to the conflation of Joel 4:13 with Isa 63:2-3, while Caird's minority reading takes the blood in Rev 14:20 as the martyrs' own.

Where scholars disagree about gat

Where the word ultimately comes from, and whether the specialized "wine press" sense is a Canaanite narrowing of a broader term for a rural estate.

  • minorityIt derives from an unattested root meaning "to press" or "to beat," reconstructed from a proto-form and supported only by an Arabic parallel.; F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 387; E. Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Jerusalem: Carta, 1987), 111c
  • majorityThe Arabic parallel is semantically too remote to carry the derivation, so the word is best treated as a primary noun whose origin is not recoverable.; L. Kogan, "Genealogical Position of Ugaritic: The Lexical Dimension"; D. Cohen, Dictionnaire des racines semitiques (DRS), 493-94
  • contestedThe Ugaritic evidence, where the same word names a rural estate or production center and no word for wine press exists, shows that "estate" is the original value and the Hebrew sense a later Canaanite specialization.; G. del Olmo Lete, "El vino en Ugarit," Aula Orientalis 37/1 (2019): 5-24; J.-A. Zamora, La vid y el vino en Ugarit (Sabadell, 2000); M. Heltzer, The Rural Community in Ancient Ugarit (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1976)
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

  • F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 387-88lexicon
  • L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (Leiden: Brill, study ed. 2001), 1:206-207lexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew II (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 373lexicon
  • M. Ottosson, "יֶקֶב yeqeb," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament VI (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990)theological-dictionary
  • R. Frankel, Wine and Oil Production in Antiquity in Israel and Other Mediterranean Countries, JSOT/ASOR Monographs 10 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999)monograph
  • O. Borowski, Agriculture in Iron Age Israel: The Evidence from Archaeology and the Bible (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1987), 110-14monograph
  • C. E. Walsh, The Fruit of the Vine: Viticulture in Ancient Israel, Harvard Semitic Monographs 60 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000)monograph
  • M. Heltzer, The Internal Organization of the Kingdom of Ugarit (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 1982), 48-79monograph
  • G. del Olmo Lete and J. Sanmartin, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, 3rd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 310-13lexicon
  • J. M. Sasson, Judges 1-12, AYB 6D (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 328-31commentary
  • R. G. Boling, Judges, AB 6A (Garden City: Doubleday, 1975), 130-32commentary
  • H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah, WBC 16 (Waco: Word, 1985), 395-97commentary
  • D. R. Hillers, Lamentations, AB 7A, 2nd rev. ed. (Garden City: Doubleday, 1992), 89-90commentary
  • F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Lamentations, Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), 68-70commentary
  • J. Goldingay, Isaiah 56-66, ICC (London: T&T Clark, 2014), 337-55commentary
  • J. Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66, AB 19B (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 245-52commentary
  • H. W. Wolff, Joel and Amos, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 79-82commentary
  • E. Assis, The Book of Joel: A Prophet Between Calamity and Hope, LHBOTS 581 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2013), 216-29monograph
  • T. Muraoka, A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint (Leuven: Peeters, 2009), s.v. ληνόςlexicon
  • D. E. Aune, Revelation 6-16, WBC 52B (Nashville: Nelson, 1998), 800-806commentary
  • G. K. Beale, The Book of Revelation, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 776-82commentary
  • A. F. Rainey, "The Identification of Philistine Gath," Eretz-Israel 12 (1975): 63*-76*article

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

All attested forms of גַּת

f s absolute

גַּת

Jdg 6:11, Isa 63:2, Lam 1:15, Jol 3:13

f p absolute

גִּתּוֹת

Neh 13:15