StrongerBible

yaḥam

יָחַם

HebrewH3179“conceive, in heat, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 30:38Gen 30:39Gen 30:41 (2×)Gen 31:10Psa 51:5(7)
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeyah-KHAMverb

What yaḥam means

to come into heat: to be gripped by the drive to mate, and so to conceive

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This is a rare and very concrete word. It appears in only five verses, and four of them belong to a single scene: Jacob breeding Laban's flocks at the watering troughs. It is the language of a herdsman, naming the season when ewes and she-goats become ready to mate. Behind it lies the ordinary Hebrew verb for being warm (חָמַם), but this form of the word narrowed to bodily heat of one particular kind.

The fifth verse is the surprise. In Psalm 51:5 the psalmist says that his mother did this with him. He had a perfectly good, ordinary word available for becoming pregnant (הָרָה) and did not use it. He reached instead for the word used of animals at the trough, and the effect in Hebrew is deliberately earthy.

English versions handle the two settings differently, which hides the link between them. In Genesis, modern translations say the flocks "were in heat" or "mated", while older ones say they "conceived". In Psalm 51 almost every version says "conceived", so an English reader has no way to hear that the psalmist is borrowing the vocabulary of the sheep pens.

Nuances

1aof flocks and herds: to come into the season of sexual readiness and breed
TranslatabilityApproximate
Gen 30:38Gen 30:39Gen 30:41 (2×)Gen 31:10
1bof a woman: to conceive, said with the earthy word otherwise used of breeding animals
Psa 51:5(7)
Psa 51:5

How much of the animal breeding sense the psalmist intends when he says his mother conceived him with this verb.

  • contestedThe choice of a breeding word is doing real rhetorical work: the psalmist deliberately reaches for the vocabulary used of ewes and she-goats and applies it to his own conception.; M. Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100, AB 17 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968), 1-11; R. Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: Norton, 2007), ad Ps 51; F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Psalms, trans. F. Bolton (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1871), ad Ps 51:5; J. J. S. Perowne, The Book of Psalms, 6th ed. (London: George Bell, 1886), ad Ps 51:5
  • contestedThe verb functions as an intensified way of saying "conceived", part of a poetic pairing that spans the whole of life before birth, and the animal overtone should not be pressed in exposition.; F.-L. Hossfeld and E. Zenger, Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 12-36; H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 1-59, trans. H. C. Oswald (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), 500-511; M. E. Tate, Psalms 51-100, WBC 20 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 15; J. Goldingay, Psalms Volume 2: Psalms 42-89 (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 121-46

What scholars say about yaḥam

Biblical Hebrew preserves two overlapping verbal stocks for heat: geminate חמם "be warm, hot" and I-yod יחם, which the grammars treat as morphological byforms of a Common Semitic root *ḥmm, with the I-yod paradigm specialized for reproductive heat (GKC §67; Joüon-Muraoka §82; Korchin, "Biforms," EHLL). HALOT glosses יחם distinctively "to be in heat, be on heat, rut" and files the Genesis 30:41, 31:10 and Psalm 51:7 (MT) forms under that specialized reproductive sense; BDB prints חמם and יחם as adjacent but separate lemmata and reports the older disagreement over the Genesis 30:38 and 30:39 forms, which are formally ambiguous between the two paradigms. TWOT (Coppes, #674, #860) calls the two biforms of one root with a secondary specialization for animal and human sexual heat. Comparative evidence points to a Northwest Semitic innovation: Akkadian emēmu and Geʿez ḥamma retain only the general heat sense, while Jewish Babylonian and Jewish Palestinian Aramaic יחם denote sexual heat, the closest parallel to the Genesis usage (Sokoloff). The reproductive sense is confined in the Hebrew Bible to Genesis 30:38, 30:39, 30:41, 31:10 and Psalm 51:5 (MT 51:7), which makes the Psalm an intertextual echo of the Jacob narrative on distributional grounds alone. The Septuagint recognized the specialization, rendering both settings with the technical Hellenistic zoological verb ἐγκισσάω / κισσάω, and Jerome caught the heat at Genesis 30:39 with in ipso calore coitus ("in the very heat of coupling"); at Psalm 50:7 he used the flat concepit ("conceived"), and that rendering, not the Greek, underlies Augustine's use of the verse in Enarrationes in Psalmos 50.10. Modern Psalms commentary (Kraus, Tate, Hossfeld and Zenger, Goldingay, deClaissé-Walford, Gerstenberger) uniformly declines the Augustinian reading and treats the verb as anthropological intensification, while Dahood, Alter, Delitzsch and Perowne press the animal breeding overtone as rhetorically deliberate. On the Jacob scene itself the verb is not in question, only the mechanism: Westermann, Sarna and Alter read the peeled rods as sympathetic magic, Hamilton defends selective breeding among heterozygotes, Waltke and Mathews stress the narrator's own theological ascription in Genesis 31:9-12, and Noegel argues a minority case that the rods were an estrus-detection device.

Where scholars disagree about yaḥam

Whether the two verbs in Genesis 30:38 and 30:39 belong to this specialized breeding word or to the general Hebrew verb for being warm, which they closely resemble in this shape.

  • contestedThey belong to this specialized breeding word, on the strength of the unmistakable forms of it elsewhere in the same Jacob story.; D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), s.v. יחם; F. E. König, Historisch-kritisches Lehrgebäude der hebräischen Sprache I.365, 417ff., cited in BDB, 328
  • contestedThey belong to the general verb for being warm, which developed a heat-of-conception use of its own for animals.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 328, s.v. חמם; W. Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae et Chaldaeae Veteris Testamenti (Leipzig, 1829-58), s.v. חמם; H. Ewald, Ausführliches Lehrbuch der hebräischen Sprache §193a; J. Olshausen, Lehrbuch der hebräischen Sprache §243b
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

  • L. Koehler, W. Baumgartner, J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), trans. M. E. J. Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), 328, 405lexicon
  • BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 328-29, s.v. חמם, יחםlexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), vols. 3-4, s.v. חמם, יחםlexicon
  • W. Gesenius, ed. H. Donner, U. Rüterswörden, J. Renz, R. Meyer, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18. Aufl. (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2010), s.v. יחםlexicon
  • L. J. Coppes, entries #674 and #860, in R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, B. K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1980)theological-dictionary
  • K.-D. Schunck, "חֵמָה ḥēmāh," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, IV (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 462-72theological-dictionary
  • P. Joüon and T. Muraoka, A Grammar of Biblical Hebrew, rev. ed. (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 2006), §82grammar
  • M. Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan / Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002), s.vv. חמם, יחםlexicon
  • N. M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 210-13commentary
  • G. J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50, WBC 2 (Dallas: Word, 1994), 254-58commentary
  • V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 281-86commentary
  • C. Westermann, Genesis 12-36, trans. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985), 479-83commentary
  • S. B. Noegel, "Sex, Sticks, and the Trickster in Gen 30:31-43: A New Look at an Old Crux," Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 25 (1997): 7-17journal-article
  • M. E. Tate, Psalms 51-100, WBC 20 (Dallas: Word, 1990), 5-29commentary
  • F.-L. Hossfeld and E. Zenger, Psalms 2: A Commentary on Psalms 51-100, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 12-36commentary
  • N. deClaissé-Walford, R. A. Jacobson, and B. L. Tanner, The Book of Psalms, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 448-58commentary
  • M. Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100, AB 17 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1968), 1-11commentary
  • J. K. Zink, "Uncleanness and Sin: A Study of Job XIV 4 and Psalm LI 7," Vetus Testamentum 17 (1967): 354-61journal-article
  • W. Leslau, Comparative Dictionary of Geʿez (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1987), 233-34lexicon
  • Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 50.10 (CCSL 38, ed. Dekkers-Fraipont)primary-source

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

All attested forms of יָחַם

piel infinitive-construct construct

יַחֵם, יַחְמֵ

Gen 30:41, Gen 31:10, Gen 30:41

piel perfect 3fs

יֶחֱמַתְ

Psa 51:5

qal consecutive-imperfect 3fp

וַיֵּחַמְנָה

Gen 30:38

qal consecutive-imperfect 3mp

וַיֶּחֱמוּ

Gen 30:39