StrongerBible

ḥamar

חָמַר

HebrewH2560“foam, churn, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Exo 2:3Job 16:16Psa 46:3(4)Psa 75:8(9)Lam 1:20Lam 2:11
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradekhah-MARverb

What ḥamar means

1

to foam up: to churn hard enough to froth and boil over

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

Picture what a liquid does when it works itself up: it heaves, it clouds over, it throws off froth. That is the whole of this word. It is not the noise the commotion makes (Hebrew has הָמָה for the roaring) and it is not the heat underneath (רָתַח covers boiling in a pot). It is the churning, frothing motion itself, and it needs no fire.

The same motion is then read off three very different subjects:

  • storm water heaving up into white foam against the mountains (Psalm 46:3)
  • wine still working and frothing in the cup God holds out to the wicked (Psalm 75:8)
  • a mourner's insides churning until they seem to turn over (Lamentations 1:20)

In the three verses about grief the word is stretched into a longer, doubled shape, so the sound of it churns too. That is why English versions reach for such different pictures there: insides that are "troubled," that "churn," that are "in ferment," and a face that "is red" or "burns" from weeping. The word itself does not name a color or a temperature. It names the upheaval, and leaves the reader to feel it in the body.

Because the verb turns up only a handful of times, and twice in verses scholars still argue over, most of what this root does in the Bible it does through its nouns: the tar of the Babel builders (חֵמָר), the potter's clay (חֹמֶר), and the poets' word for wine (חֶמֶר).

Nuances

1aof water: to heave up and foam in a storm
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong
Psa 46:3(4)
1bof wine: to foam and work in the cup
Psa 75:8(9)
Psa 75:8

Whether the wine in Psalm 75:8 is described as foaming or as red.

  • majorityFoaming or fermenting: the verb belongs with the churning of water and of the body, and the cup of wrath is pictured as still working.; BDB, s.v. חמר I; Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, s.v. חמר
  • minorityRed: the word here is a color term describing red wine, which fits the medieval understanding of the whole root as naming redness.; Ibn Ezra, commentary on Psalms, ad loc.; David Kimhi (Radak), commentary on Psalms, ad loc.
1cof a person's insides or face: to churn and burn with grief
Job 16:16Lam 1:20Lam 2:11
Job 16:16

Whether the face in Job 16:16 is reddened, swollen, or burning and in turmoil from weeping.

  • contestedThe face is red from weeping: the verb here belongs to a separate word meaning to be red, cognate with the Arabic word for red.; BDB, s.v. חמר IV; HALOT, s.v. חמר (glossed "to glow"); Ibn Ezra, commentary on Job, ad loc.
  • contestedThe face is inflamed or in ferment, not colored: the word describes the same upheaval it describes when the subject is a mourner's inward parts, and the reconstructed color verb rests only on the Arabic evidence.; C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Book of Job, on 16:16; Maria Bulakh, "Was There a Color Term *ḥmr 'to be red' in Proto-Semitic?", Babel und Bibel 9 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 3-18
  • minorityThe face is swollen or tear-stained: the sense is a physical effect of weeping that some languages cannot render with a color word at all.; W. D. Reyburn, A Handbook on the Book of Job (UBS Handbook Series; New York: United Bible Societies, 1992), on 16:16
2

to coat something with tar: to seal it with bitumen so water cannot get in

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is a workman's word, and it is really a substance turned into a verb. The Hebrew name for natural asphalt, the black tar that seeps to the surface around the Dead Sea and in Mesopotamia, is חֵמָר, and to do this verb to a basket is to give it a coat of that. English has no verb that carries its own material inside it this way, so translators supply the substance: she "daubed it with bitumen," she "coated it with tar."

The one place it occurs is the sealing of the basket that carries the baby Moses down the Nile, where bitumen from the ground is paired with pitch from trees. That is a real waterproofing recipe rather than a poetic flourish, and it quietly echoes the sealing of Noah's ark, the only other vessel in the Bible built to keep a rescued life afloat.

Whether this sense has anything to do with foaming and churning is an open question. It may simply be a look-alike: the Hebrew alphabet writes with one letter two sounds that were once distinct, so words that now appear to be relatives may never have been related at all.

Exo 2:3

What scholars say about ḥamar

Every major lexicon splits the material written ḥ-m-r into homonyms, and the disagreement is over where the lines fall, not whether to draw them. BDB gives four verbal entries: I "ferment, boil or foam up" (Psalm 46:3; Psalm 75:8; the reduplicated forms of Lamentations 1:20 and 2:11, plus Wellhausen's conjectural verb at Habakkuk 3:15), II "cover or smear with asphalt" (Exodus 2:3 only, formed from the noun ḥēmār), III "heap up" (no finite verb, posited behind the noun ḥōmer), and IV "be red" (Job 16:16 only). BDB thus splits the identical reduplicated form between roots I and IV, assigning the bowels of Lamentations to "ferment" and the face of Job to "be red." Gesenius instead derives redness from boiling and inflammation, and HALOT glosses the reduplicated verb "to glow"; DCH, working synchronically and maximally, multiplies proposed homonyms further.

The decisive comparative evidence is phonological. Ugaritic and Arabic preserve the contrast between velar ḫ and pharyngeal ḥ that Hebrew lost: Ugaritic ḫmr "wine, must" and Arabic khamr "wine" with khammara "to ferment, to cover" belong to one root, while Arabic ʾaḥmar "red" and ḥimār "donkey" belong to another (Ugaritic ḥmr "donkey"). On that analysis the wine, ferment, and bitumen words are not etymologically the same root as the red and donkey words, and much of Hebrew's apparent polysemy is an artifact of the writing system. Maria Bulakh presses the point against the reconstructed Proto-Semitic color verb, holding that it "solely relies on the Arabic basic colour term for red" and reinterpreting the disputed Hebrew forms as reflexes of a verb meaning to be inflamed, said of internal and external organs alike; she rejects HALOT's "to glow" and the senses "to be in disorder" or "to ail" as inapplicable to a human face. Keil and Delitzsch had already argued for ferment rather than redness in both Job 16:16 and Lamentations, and Hillers reads the Lamentations passages as churning or in ferment. The ancient versions show the word was already opaque: the Septuagint renders the Job clause as inward parts burnt up rather than a face reddened, has "my heart is troubled" at Lamentations 1:20, and reads Habakkuk 3:15 as mud.

Three of the six finite occurrences sit in text-critical or parsing questions. Psalm 75:8 is read as foaming wine (BDB I) or as red wine (Ibn Ezra, Ibn Balaam, Kimhi), while the Septuagint and Vulgate took the cup as unmixed wine full of spiced mixture. Habakkuk 3:15 has the noun ḥōmer, which BDB flags as dubious and Wellhausen emended to a finite verb "the many waters foamed." Isaiah 27:2's kerem ḥemer "vineyard of wine" competes with kerem ḥemed "pleasant vineyard," the reading behind the Septuagint and Targum. Since the verb is rare and the nouns (bitumen, clay and mortar, the homer measure, heaps, wine) are frequent and spread across the canon, the evidential weight of the root lies with the nouns; the traditional unification of the whole family under redness (Ibn Ezra, Ibn Balaam, Kimhi, and later Klein) is best treated as history of interpretation rather than established etymology.

Where scholars disagree about ḥamar

Whether the material written ḥ-m-r is one wide-ranging root or several unrelated look-alike roots that Hebrew's spelling fused into one.

  • majoritySeveral distinct roots. The lexicons separate a verb for fermenting or foaming, a verb formed from the word for bitumen, a root behind the words for heaps, and (on some accounts) a verb for being red. Comparison with Ugaritic and Arabic, which keep apart two sounds Hebrew writes with the single letter ḥet, separates the wine, ferment, and bitumen words from the red and donkey words.; BDB, s.v. חמר I-IV; HALOT, s.v. חמר; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 3, s.v. חמר; Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, 3rd rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2015), s.v. ḫmr, ḥmr
  • minorityOne family unified by the idea of redness, so that wine, clay, bitumen, and the reddish brown donkey are all named from their color.; Ibn Ezra, commentaries on Psalms and Job, ad loc.; David Kimhi (Radak), Sefer ha-Shorashim, s.v. חמר; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (Jerusalem: Carta, 1987), s.v. חמר

Whether Biblical Hebrew has a verb meaning "to be red" at all, which would make Job 16:16 its single instance.

  • contestedYes: a distinct verb meaning to be red, cognate with Arabic ʾaḥmar, underlies the face reddened by weeping in Job 16:16, and shows up as glowing or reddening in the lexicons.; BDB, s.v. חמר IV; HALOT, s.v. חמר (glossed "to glow")
  • contestedNo: the reconstructed color verb rests only on the Arabic word for red, and the Hebrew forms are better read as a verb meaning to be inflamed, said of internal and external organs alike.; Maria Bulakh, "Was There a Color Term *ḥmr 'to be red' in Proto-Semitic?", Babel und Bibel 9 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 3-18; C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: Job; Lamentations
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. חמר I-IVlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler and Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. חמר; ḥēmār; ḥōmerlexicon
  • W. Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. חמרlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 3 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996), s.v. חמרlexicon
  • Maria Bulakh, "Was There a Color Term *ḥmr 'to be red' in Proto-Semitic?", Babel und Bibel 9 (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2016), 3-18article
  • C. F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament: Job; Lamentationscommentary
  • Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations, Anchor Bible 7A, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1992)commentary
  • W. D. Reyburn, A Handbook on the Book of Job (UBS Handbook Series; New York: United Bible Societies, 1992)handbook
  • Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, trans. W. G. E. Watson, 3rd rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2015)lexicon
  • Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (Jerusalem: Carta, 1987)etymological dictionary
  • Claus Westermann, Genesis 1-11: A Commentary, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1984), on Genesis 11:3commentary

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

All attested forms of חָמַר

piel perfect 3cp

חֳמַרְמְרוּ, חֳמַרְמָרוּ

Job 16:16, Lam 2:11, Lam 1:20

qal consecutive-imperfect 3fs

וַתַּחְמְרָ

Exo 2:3

qal imperfect 3mp

יֶחְמְרוּ

Psa 46:3

qal perfect 3ms

חָמַר

Psa 75:8