pain: the felt suffering of a person, in the body or in the heart, which Hebrew names as one thing
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This word names pain at its widest: the raw hurt a person feels, whether it rises in the body, in the heart, or in both at once. English tends to sort suffering into separate boxes, bodily "pain" on one side and inner "sorrow" on the other. Biblical Hebrew does not draw that line, and this word is the clearest example of it. The same term covers a physical ache and the anguish of a breaking heart, and very often it means them together, as a single experience.
In its six appearances the word ranges across that whole territory:
It is the great suffering that leaves Job's friends sitting in silence with him for seven days (Job 2:13), and the ache Job says will not be soothed whether he speaks or stays quiet (Job 16:6).
It is the inner turmoil that flares up in the psalmist while he holds his tongue (Psalm 39:2), and the pain of heart that makes people cry out (Isaiah 65:14).
Twice it is a hurt pictured as beyond healing: an incurable pain when a harvest and a nation fail (Isaiah 17:11), and a wound that never lets up in the prophet's own complaint to God (Jeremiah 15:18).
Because the word refuses to specialize, poets and prophets reached for it constantly. With one term they could name a body's ache, a grieving spirit, and a whole community's collapse, and mean all of it at once. That same refusal is why it resists translation: no single English word carries both the body and the heart the way this one does.
keeps the bodily edge that plain "sorrow" drops, so that even Job's raw physical distress falls under itJob 16:6
Both
both name deep inner distress that presses on a personPsa 39:2
Only sorrow
English "sorrow" sounds purely emotional, a mood of sadness, and loses the bodily ache the word can carry
“grief”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“suffering”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How ke'ev differs from similar Hebrew words
מַכְאוֹבThe near-twin noun from the same root, with the same wide range of pain. It is about three times as common, reaches even into everyday narrative, and is the word that stands behind the "man of sorrows" of Isaiah 53.
Stacks up into the plural, naming many separate pains at once, so it can describe a whole life or a whole people full of sorrows.Exo 3:7Psa 32:10Ecc 2:23
Names sorrows that one person can carry for another, or that God sees in an entire people, not only the grief a sufferer feels in himself.Isa 53:4Psa 69:26
כָּאַבThe verb of the same family, meaning to be in pain or to hurt. It names the act or state of hurting, while this word names the pain itself.
It turns the hurt into something you can point at, size up, and call your own. Job's friends could see how great his suffering had grown, and it silenced them for seven days (Job 2:13), and Job speaks of "my pain" as a load he is carrying whether he talks or keeps quiet (Job 16:6).Job 2:13Job 16:6
Because the hurt is a thing in its own right, it can be described as lasting and past fixing: an incurable pain on the day a harvest and a nation fail (Isaiah 17:11), and a pain Jeremiah says never lets up and refuses to be healed (Jeremiah 15:18). The other word is never stretched over time like this.Isa 17:11Jer 15:18
It can be the thing a cry or an inner churning comes out of. The psalmist holds his tongue and his pain is stirred up inside him (Psalm 39:2), and people are said to cry out from pain of heart (Isaiah 65:14). The pain is the well the sound comes from.Psa 39:2Isa 65:14
Both
Neither one draws the line English draws between bodily pain and inner grief. One describes men still sore in their bodies on the third day (Genesis 34:25) and a heart that aches in the middle of laughter (Proverbs 14:13); the other covers the undivided suffering that left Job's friends speechless (Job 2:13) and the pain of heart that makes people cry out (Isaiah 65:14).Gen 34:25Pro 14:13Job 2:13Isa 65:14
Both belong to the voice of the sufferer in poems of complaint, where a person tells God how badly he is hurting. The psalmist calls himself afflicted and in pain (Psalm 69:29) and Job says his own flesh hurts him (Job 14:22), while Job elsewhere says nothing eases his pain (Job 16:6) and Jeremiah asks why his pain has no end (Jeremiah 15:18).Psa 69:29Job 14:22Job 16:6Jer 15:18
It can name the one doing the hurting, and not only the one who is hurt. God says he is the one who wounds and then binds up (Job 5:18), and he denies that he was the one who hurt the people the lying prophets had frightened (Ezekiel 13:22). It can even be a thing that inflicts: Israel is promised it will no longer have a thorn around it that stings (Ezekiel 28:24). The other word never points at a source this way; it simply names the hurt.Job 5:18Ezk 13:22Ezk 28:24
It reaches past living bodies to land. Israel is told to ruin every good plot of ground by covering it with stones (2 Kings 3:19), the one place the hurting is aimed at a field rather than a person. The other word is only ever a person's pain.2Ki 3:19
It describes a person as hurting rather than naming the hurt he carries. A man's own flesh is what hurts him (Job 14:22), and the psalmist calls himself afflicted and in pain (Psalm 69:29). The hurting is something happening to him, not an object he can hold up and point at.Job 14:22Psa 69:29
יָגוֹןGrief or sorrow, weighted toward heaviness of spirit. This word is broader, holding bodily hurt as well as sorrow of heart.
A hurt tied to the body, the ache of a wound that will not close and a blow that keeps on hurting.Jer 15:18Isa 17:11
The ache that neither speaking nor silence can ease: Job says it is not relieved though he keeps talking, and the psalmist finds it only stirred up worse when he holds his tongue.Job 16:6Psa 39:2
Both
Both name a deep, settled suffering that a person carries in the heart, not a passing bad mood.Psa 13:2Isa 65:14
The grief of mourning and loss, the sorrow that comes out as sighing and weeping; it stands beside gray hairs going down to the grave and beside the sound of a mourner.Gen 42:38Isa 35:10
Again and again it is the thing God turns into gladness, set as the plain opposite of joy so that the day of rejoicing is measured against it.Est 9:22Jer 31:13
חֳלִיSickness, the failing of the body. This word can include that but is not limited to it, reaching also to grief and inner anguish.
names pain as the raw felt hurt itself, whether a wound that will not stop throbbing or the ache of a heart in mourning, rather than the illness behind it.Jer 15:18Isa 65:14Psa 39:2
Both
both stretch past their core to name deep, drawn-out suffering a person must carry, and translators reach for grief to render each.Isa 53:3Job 16:6
names a concrete bodily disease that seizes a person, keeps them bedridden, and runs a course toward either recovery or death, often with a prognosis attached: will the patient get well or not.1Ki 17:172Ki 1:22Ch 16:12
can picture a whole people as a diseased body, so that a nation's corruption or coming ruin is spoken of as a sickness spreading through it.Isa 1:5Hos 5:13
Names the felt suffering itself, the raw ache of body or heart, with no idea of work behind it. It is the unrelieved sting a sufferer endures, not anything he produced.Job 16:6Jer 15:18
Sits most naturally in the heart and the mood: the inward grief that wells up in silence or breaks out in a cry of anguish. It describes a person's emotional state of being wounded.Psa 39:2Isa 65:14Job 2:13
Both
Both can name something that wounds and grieves a person, so English Bibles render either one as "sorrow." The difference is the source: one is the ache that is felt, the other is the hurt that toil or wounding speech inflicts.Isa 17:11Pro 15:1
Centers on strenuous, productive labor and the gain it yields, not on a feeling. Its core is the sweat and effort of work, which can even be spoken of with a positive edge as the source of profit.Pro 14:23Pro 5:10Pro 10:22
Carries the burden of toilsome work imposed as a hardship, the heavy effort of producing bread, bearing children, or laboring under a curse. The weight is in the labor, not in an ache one simply feels.Gen 3:16Psa 127:2
ke'ev in the other biblical languages
ὀδύνηGreek“anguish”The Greek word for sharp pain or anguish, covering both bodily and inner distress; the closest single counterpart to this word.
In the New Testament it names only grief of the mind and heart, never a bodily hurt: a consuming inner sorrow.Rom 9:2
It can be self-inflicted, the sorrow people bring on themselves; the craving for money pierces them through with many griefs.1Ti 6:10
λύπηGreek“grief”The Greek word for grief or sorrow, weighted toward the emotional. This Hebrew word is wider, holding bodily pain and heartache together.
In the New Testament it is always inward, emotional grief of the heart and mind, never a bodily ache.Luk 22:45Jhn 16:6
It can name a good, God-honoring sorrow: the grief over sin that turns a person toward repentance.2Co 7:10
What scholars say about ke'ev
כְּאֵב is one of three principal forms of the root כאב (verb כָּאַב, noun כְּאֵב, noun מַכְאוֹב), a root the standard lexica place squarely in the semantic field of suffering. BDB (p. 456) is the only major lexicon to subdivide the entries verse by verse into physical and mental columns; HALOT, Gesenius (18th ed.), and DCH give the same range without imposing that split, and DCH adds Ben Sira and Qumran attestations. Rudolf Mosis, in his TDOT article on the root (building on Josef Scharbert's monograph Der Schmerz im Alten Testament), argues that the physical-versus-emotional division is not lexical: Hebrew does not partition pain along mind-body lines, and the parallel terms in poetic context (חֳלִי "sickness," נֶגַע "stroke," יָגוֹן "grief," מַכָּה "wound") do the disambiguating work instead. Comparative Semitic evidence points to a Central Semitic stative ancestor meaning roughly "to be afflicted," with the daughter languages specializing (Arabic كأب narrowing to emotional dejection, Aramaic and Syriac ܟܐܒ toward bodily illness) while Hebrew preserved the older polysemy; the proposed Akkadian link to kibtu is marginal and disputed. Of the six occurrences of the noun, כְּאֵב is confined to poetry and prophetic lament (Job 2:13; 16:6; Psalm 39:2;Isaiah 17:11; 65:14; Jeremiah 15:18); the near-synonym מַכְאוֹב is far more frequent and alone reaches narrative prose (Exodus 3:7) and the existential register of Ecclesiastes. Blenkinsopp and Wildberger note that Isaiah 17:11 pairs the noun with a sickness term to turn political catastrophe into terminal illness; Holladay and Lundbom read Jeremiah 15:18 as the prophet's incurable wound, whether biographically or as adopted lament convention; Clines treats Job 2:13 as a deliberately integrated somatic, emotional, and theological wound.
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, p. 456, s.vv. כָּאַב, כְּאֵב, מַכְאוֹבlexicon
HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. כְּאֵבlexicon
Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch, 18. Aufl., s.v. כְּאֵבlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), vol. IV, s.vv. כאב, כְּאֵב, מַכְאוֹבlexicon
Rudolf Mosis, "כאב," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. VII, pp. 7-13theological-dictionary
Josef Scharbert, Der Schmerz im Alten Testament (BBB 8)reference
Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39 (Anchor Bible 19)commentary
Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 13-27 (Continental Commentary)commentary
William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1 (Hermeneia)commentary
Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20 (Anchor Bible 21A)commentary