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yisra'el

יִשְׂרָאֵל

HebrewH3478Proper Noun“Israel, the Israelites”

Appears 2508 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 32:28(29)Gen 32:32(33)Gen 34:7Gen 35:10 (2×)Gen 35:21Gen 35:22 (2×)Gen 36:31Gen 37:3Gen 37:13Gen 42:5Gen 43:6Gen 43:8Gen 43:11Gen 49:7Gen 49:16Gen 49:24Gen 49:28Exo 1:7Exo 1:9Exo 1:12Exo 1:13Exo 2:23Exo 12:15Num 19:13Num 21:6Num 24:17Num 25:4Num 32:22Deu 17:12Deu 19:13Deu 22:22Deu 25:6Jdg 20:13Jdg 21:3
Compound of
sarahשָׂרָהto strive2H8280
elאֵלGod241H410
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeyis-raw-ALEnoun

What yisra'el means

Israel: the name given to Jacob, and then to the covenant people and nation descended from him

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled

Israel is first the new name given to one man, Jacob, after a night of wrestling at the Jabbok river, and then the name of everyone descended from him. The whole life of the word is a steady widening of who it points to. It starts as a personal name for a single patriarch, becomes the name of his family grown into a people, then the name of a kingdom, then (after that kingdom split in two) the political name of just the northern half over against Judah in the south, and finally a deep word for the whole covenant community of God, an identity that outlived both the land and the monarchy.

These are not different words but one name aimed at a moving target. The shared thread is always the covenant line that runs from Jacob outward: the senses below simply mark how far down that line a given verse is looking. In Genesis the name usually means the man himself. From Exodus on it almost always means the people, often in the set phrase the children of Israel. In Kings and the eighth-century prophets it frequently narrows to the breakaway northern kingdom. In Isaiah of the exile and in Ezekiel it widens again into the chosen servant people and the reunited nation of the future.

The famous explanation the Bible itself gives, that the name means one who strives with God, comes from the wrestling story and is a deliberate play on the sound of the name rather than a strict translation of it. Most scholars think the name is older than that story and was originally a sentence about God acting, something like God rules or God contends. The name therefore holds two truths at once that the Hebrew Bible never fully resolves: God acts, and this people struggles. The etymology debate is laid out below.

Nuances

1aJacob the patriarch himself, given this name after wrestling through the night at the Jabbok
Gen 32:28(29)Gen 35:10 (2×)Gen 35:21Gen 37:3Gen 43:8Gen 46:1Gen 47:27Gen 48:2Exo 1:1Exo 6:14Exo 32:13Num 1:20
1bthe whole covenant people descended from Jacob, the twelve tribes together, very often in the phrase the children of Israel
Gen 32:32(33)Gen 34:7Gen 36:31Gen 49:7Gen 49:16Gen 49:28Exo 1:7Exo 4:22Num 24:5Deu 6:41Ki 8:23Isa 5:7
1cthe breakaway northern kingdom specifically, set against Judah in the south after the monarchy divided
1Ki 11:371Ki 11:381Ki 12:161Ki 12:181Ki 12:191Ki 12:201Ki 12:212Ki 17:62Ki 17:18Hos 1:1Amo 7:10Amo 7:15
1dthe chosen, servant, and restored covenant community, the people defined by God's election and future hope rather than by land or kingdom
1Ch 16:132Ch 30:1Ezr 1:3Ezr 2:2Ezr 2:59Ezr 9:1Isa 41:8Isa 44:21Isa 49:3Jer 31:31Ezk 37:22Hos 11:1

What scholars say about yisra'el

The standard lexica and the comparative onomastic literature converge against the Genesis folk etymology. Since Noth's Die israelitischen Personennamen (1928), the consensus reads the name as a Northwest-Semitic theophoric of the yiqtol-plus-El type, in which the divine element El is the grammatical subject (as in Ishmael, El hears; Ezekiel, El strengthens), yielding roughly El rules or El contends, with God as the active subject rather than the patriarch as the one who strives. The favored root is most often sarar, to rule (Cross, de Vaux, Day), or sarah, to contend read with El as subject (Noth, Speiser, Westermann); the ishar to be upright derivation is rejected on phonemic grounds and treated as only a wordplay link to Jeshurun. HALOT, BDB, TDOT (Zobel), and TLOT all treat Genesis 32 as etiological paronomasia. The name is attested as an ordinary personal name before any biblical use: Ugaritic yshr-il, Eblaite Ish-ra-il, and the wider Amorite yaqtul-plus-Il corpus (Huffmon, Gronahl, Streck). The Merneptah Stele (c. 1208 BCE) gives the earliest extra-biblical mention of Israel as a people, marked by an Egyptian classifier for a socio-ethnic group rather than a city-state (Hasel). The referential development from individual to people to divided kingdom to post-exilic covenant community is mapped statistically by Danell (1946) and worked out for Chronicles by Williamson and Japhet, who show the Chronicler's inclusive all-Israel vision.

Where scholars disagree about yisra'el

What the name Israel originally meant. The Bible's own explanation at the Jabbok takes it as he who strives with God, from a verb for contending, but that explanation is tied to the wrestling story and is grammatically odd, since in this class of Hebrew names built on a verb plus the divine element El, El is normally the one doing the action, not the object.

  • majorityThe name is an old Northwest-Semitic sentence-name with God as the subject, meaning roughly God rules or God contends; the Genesis explanation is a later theological play on the name's sound, and the name itself is attested as an ordinary personal name centuries before Israel the people existed.; M. Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen (1928), Sec. 27; F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (1973), 44-46; HALOT, s.v. יִשְׂרָאֵל
  • minorityThe traditional derivation from the verb to strive, yielding he who strives or persists with God, can be retained, with God read as the subject so that the sense is El persists or perseveres; this keeps the canonical wordplay close to the name's actual root.; BDB, s.v. יִשְׂרָאֵל
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

  • M. Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen, BWANT 46 (1928), Sec. 27, 207-208monograph
  • HALOT, s.v. יִשְׂרָאֵלlexicon
  • BDB, s.v. יִשְׂרָאֵלlexicon
  • H.-J. Zobel, "יִשְׂרָאֵל," TDOT 6:397-420dictionary
  • F. M. Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard, 1973), 13-14, 44-46monograph
  • R. de Vaux, The Early History of Israel (1978), 2:580-581monograph
  • J. Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (2000), 24monograph
  • C. Westermann, Genesis 12-36 (Augsburg, 1985), 512-520commentary
  • E. A. Speiser, Genesis, Anchor Bible 1 (1964), 255commentary
  • G. J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50, WBC 2 (1994), 295-297commentary
  • V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 18-50, NICOT (1995), 334commentary
  • N. M. Sarna, Genesis, JPS Torah Commentary (1989), 227, Excursus 25commentary
  • H. B. Huffmon, Amorite Personal Names in the Mari Texts (Johns Hopkins, 1965)monograph
  • F. Gröndahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit (1967), 31, 196monograph
  • M. G. Hasel, "Israel in the Merneptah Stela," BASOR 296 (1994), 45-61article
  • K. A. Kitchen, Ramesside Inscriptions Translated and Annotated IV (2003), 10-15monograph
  • G. A. Danell, Studies in the Name Israel in the Old Testament (Uppsala, 1946)monograph
  • H. G. M. Williamson, Israel in the Books of Chronicles (Cambridge, 1977)monograph
  • S. Japhet, The Ideology of the Book of Chronicles (1989), 267-334monograph

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

All attested forms of יִשְׂרָאֵל

noun

יִשְׂרָאֵל, יִּשְׂרָאֵל

Gen 32:32, Gen 34:7, Gen 36:31, Gen 49:7, Gen 49:16, Gen 49:24, Gen 49:28, Exo 1:7

m

יִשְׂרָאֵל

Gen 32:28, Gen 35:10, Gen 35:10, Gen 35:21, Gen 35:22, Gen 35:22, Gen 37:3, Gen 37:13