StrongerBible

ḥever

חֶבֶר

HebrewH2267“spell, enchantment, ...”

Appears 4 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Deu 18:11Psa 58:5(6)Isa 47:9Isa 47:12
Word studyResearch-gradeKHEH-vernoun

What ḥever means

a binding spell: words tied around a person or creature to hold it under someone else's power.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

This noun is built from the ordinary Hebrew verb for joining or tying things together (חבר), the verb used of curtains fastened to each other in the tabernacle. A spell, on that picture, is a knot: words fastened around a person or an animal so that it can no longer act freely. That is why older English Bibles call the person who does this a "charmer," while newer ones say he "casts a spell."

All four places the word appears fall into two shapes:

  • Twice it stands right beside that verb of tying, so the Hebrew says something like "ties a tying," a phrase that names a trade: the forbidden practitioner in the law (Deuteronomy 18:11), and the skilled spell binder whose voice a deaf cobra refuses to hear (Psalm 58:5).
  • Twice it is plural and owned, "your spells," naming the whole stock of magic that Babylon had built up and trusted (Isaiah 47:9, 47:12).

Both settings treat the practice as real and serious rather than quaint. The law files the spell binder among the practices Israel is not to copy, next to divination (קסם) and consulting the dead. Isaiah grants that Babylon's spells were formidable, then tells her to bring them all out and watch them fail to save her.

Nuances

1athe binding spell itself, named alongside the act of tying it, in the set phrase that describes a person's trade.
TranslatabilityPartial
Deu 18:11Psa 58:5(6)
1bspells as a body of magic power that a person or a city keeps and relies on.
Isa 47:9Isa 47:12

What scholars say about ḥever

BDB assigns the segolate noun חֶבֶר three senses: "company, band" (Hosea 6:9); the abstract "association, society," only in בֵּית חָבֶר (Proverbs 21:9 = 25:24); and "spell," both as the cognate object of חבר (Deuteronomy 18:11; Psalm 58:6 in Hebrew numbering) and standing alone of Babylonian magic (Isaiah 47:9, 12). The underlying morphology data files only the "spell" cluster under H2267, the social sense being tagged at separate Strong's numbers, so all four occurrences treated here belong to the magical sense. The collocation חֹבֵר חָבֶר / חֹבֵר חֲבָרִים is literally "a binder of a binding," i.e. one who ties knots and recites binding formulae; Ann Jeffers builds her study of Palestinian and Syrian magic out from Deuteronomy 18:9ff and analyses the practitioner as a "binder," and Delitzsch already glossed the Psalm 58 phrase as binding by spells and tying fast by magic knots, though the parallel with מְלַחֲשִׁים there shows the vocabulary of spoken magic is equally in play. For Isaiah 47, Alinda Damsma compares the chapter with the Akkadian anti-witchcraft series Maqlû and concludes that the thematic and occasionally lexical overlap may indicate Deutero-Isaiah's incorporation of Mesopotamian ideas about (counter-)witchcraft; Shalom Paul and Goldingay likewise read the plural חֲבָרִים within the prophet's polemic against Babylonian magic. On etymology, BDB and the classic Gesenius treat "join, associate" and "bind by spell" as one root, deriving the magical sense from the physical sense of binding; the Ugaritic cognate ḥbr, glossed "exorcist, spell-caster" in DULAT 1:348, strengthens that single-root account, while the one persistent difficulty on the other side is phonological, since the Akkadian binding-by-spell forms abāru/ubburu lack a guttural answering to Hebrew ḥ. That etymological question remains open, but it does not touch the denotation of the noun in these four verses, on which the lexica agree.

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), s.v. חברlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm, Eng. ed. M. E. J. Richardson, Brill 1994-2000), s.v. חברlexicon
  • DCH (David J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, Sheffield), vol. 3, s.v. חברlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Herbert Donner with Rudolf Meyer (2013), s.v. חברlexicon
  • Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), ed. Botterweck, Ringgren, and Fabry (Eerdmans), s.v. חברdictionary
  • Ann Jeffers, Magic and Divination in Ancient Palestine and Syria, SHCANE 8 (Brill, 1996)monograph
  • Alinda Damsma, "Burn the Witch! A Comparison between the Portrayal of Sorceress Babylon in Isaiah 47 and the Figure of the Witch in Maqlu," Vetus Testamentum 72 (2022): 404-430article
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy, JPS Torah Commentary (1996)commentary
  • Shalom M. Paul, Isaiah 40-66, Eerdmans Critical Commentary (2012)commentary
  • John Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40-55, ICC, 2 vols. (T&T Clark, 2006)commentary
  • Franz Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms, on Psalm 58commentary
  • Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquin Sanmartin, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition (DULAT), 1:348lexicon
  • Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Ignacio Marquez Rowe, Incantations and Anti-Witchcraft Texts from Ugarit (De Gruyter, 2014)monograph

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

All attested forms of חֶבֶר

m p construct

חֲבָרַיִךְ

Isa 47:9, Isa 47:12

m p absolute

חֲבָרִים

Psa 58:5

m s absolute

חָבֶר

Deu 18:11