StrongerBible

karmel

כַּרְמֶל

HebrewH3759“fruitful field, fertile land, ...”

Appears 17 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Lev 2:14Lev 23:142Ki 4:422Ki 19:232Ch 26:10Isa 10:18Isa 16:10Isa 29:17 (2×)Isa 32:15 (2×)Isa 32:16Isa 37:24Jer 2:7Jer 4:26
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradekar-MELnoun

What karmel means

1

fertile country: land whose defining quality is that it grows things richly, as against forest or desert

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This word is built on the ordinary Hebrew word for a vineyard (כֶּרֶם), and it keeps that word's basic idea: ground that has been planted and pays the planting back. It is not simply a word for a field. It names land whose distinguishing quality is richness, the sort of country where orchards, vines, and standing grain do well.

That is why it almost never stands by itself. The prophets pair it with something:

  • untended woodland, the ground nobody planted (יַעַר)
  • the open desert, where nothing grows at all
  • vineyards named in the very next breath, a play on the word's own root

Isaiah turns the first two of those into his signature picture of a world turned over: desert becomes rich farmland, and rich farmland is reckoned as scrub. The point is not geography but the overturning of what everyone expects, and the same reversal runs the other way in Jeremiah, where the good land God gave becomes desert.

One more thing shapes how the word reaches English. Israel's most famously lush mountain came to be called by exactly this word (כַּרְמֶל), because the fertile place is what it was. So a translator has to decide, verse by verse, whether the text is naming that mountain or describing rich land, and the older translations often froze it into a place name where the sentence plainly wants a description.

Nuances

1aa real stretch of rich ground: farmland, orchard land, or the fertile country of a region
2Ch 26:10Isa 16:10Jer 48:33Mic 7:14
Mic 7:14

Whether Micah 7:14 names Mount Carmel or uses the common noun for fertile pastureland.

  • majorityMount Carmel, standing in a triad with Bashan and Gilead, the traditional Israelite grazing lands.; Bruce K. Waltke, A Commentary on Micah (Eerdmans, 2007), on 7:14; Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Micah, Anchor Bible 24E (Doubleday, 2000), on 7:14; Delbert R. Hillers, Micah, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1984), on 7:14; BDB, s.v. כַּרְמֶל, p. 502
  • minorityThe common noun for garden land, since the verse sets woodland inside it just as the prophetic contrast texts do.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. כַּרְמֶל; Julius Wellhausen and George Adam Smith, cited as holding this reading in BDB, s.v. כַּרְמֶל, p. 502
1bthe good, fruitful land God gave Israel, named for its productiveness
Jer 2:7Jer 4:26
1cfertile land as the opposite of desert and wild woodland, in the prophets' pictures of reversal
CertaintySettled
Isa 29:17 (2×)Isa 32:15 (2×)Isa 32:16
1dthe deep, thickly growing heart of a wooded highland
CertaintySettled
2Ki 19:23Isa 10:18Isa 37:24
2

fresh grain: newly ripened kernels still in the ear, the earliest edible stage of a harvest

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is a harvest word, and it is precise. It names grain caught at one moment: ripe enough to eat, still on the stalk, not yet threshed or milled. Roasted over a fire it makes a plain, ready food, and farmers in the region still parch barley much this way.

The offering laws lean on that precision. The firstfruits offering asks for coarse meal made from these kernels, alongside the word for grain at the green, just-ripening stage (אָבִיב). Leviticus 23 then forbids three things until the first sheaf has been presented: finished bread, grain parched over fire (קָלִי), and these fresh kernels. Naming the rawest form closes the last loophole, because it covers grain at every stage from stalk to loaf.

The tie back to the other meaning is simple. Rich land is where fresh grain comes from, so one word came to cover both the fertile ground and its first produce. That is why the standard dictionaries print these as two senses of a single word rather than as two words that happen to look alike.

Lev 2:14Lev 23:142Ki 4:42

What scholars say about karmel

Virtually every modern lexicon treats כַּרְמֶל as one polysemous lexeme with two related senses, "orchard, plantation, garden land, fruitful field" and "fresh, ripe ears of grain", the second a metonymic development of the first (the karmel-land yields the karmel-grain). BDB (p. 502) prints "I. כַּרְמֶל" with two numbered meanings and files the Leviticus and 2 Kings 4 grain texts under the same head as the Isaiah and Jeremiah field texts; HALOT, Gesenius-Buhl (17th ed.) and the 18th edition (Donner et al.), DCH vol. 4 (Clines), TWOT 1042a, and NIDOTTE follow the same architecture. TDOT has no separate article, treating the word inside J. Hausmann's entry on כֶּרֶם (vol. VII, 319-334) as an extended form whose grain sense develops from the orchard sense. The etymological consensus derives the noun from כֶּרֶם plus a rare nominal afformative lamed (compare גִּבְעֹל, עֲרָפֶל, perhaps בַּרְזֶל), a class already recognized in Gesenius-Kautzsch 85 and Bauer-Leander 61 and defended most fully by Martin Jan Mulder, whose analysis underlies HALOT and the TDOT treatment; even sympathetic scholars concede the evidence for a lamed sufformative is thin. Belmonte Marin's analysis of the Amarna toponym Gintu-Kirmil (EA 288) as krm plus l places the formation in Late Bronze Canaanite. The popular kerem plus el ("vineyard of God") derivation is rejected on vocalization grounds by every major lexicon, and the rabbinic kar male ("full kernel") reading at b. Sotah 5a is homiletical. Comparative support for the extended form is thin: Ugaritic attests krm abundantly but krml only as a toponym (DULAT lists no appellative), Arabic has karm but no karmal, Akkadian offers no cognate (karmu "ruin heap" is unrelated), while Targum Jonathan and the Peshitta simply carry over the Aramaic כַּרְמְלָא. The color noun כַּרְמִיל (2 Chronicles 2:6, 2:13, 3:14) is a false friend, an Iranian loan for the crimson scale-insect dye (Korn and Warning 2017). The ancient versions split by passage type: for the priestly grain texts LXX uses the technically precise χίδρα and Vulgate paraphrases (spicis adhuc virentibus, pultes, frumentum novum), with Targum Onqelos and the Peshitta agreeing on crushed fresh kernels; in the prophets LXX-Isaiah transliterates (ὁ Χέρμελ, even τὸ ὄρος τὸ Χέρμελ at 29:17, shifting to Καρμήλῳ at 32:16), LXX-Jeremiah and 2 Paralipomena use Κάρμηλος, and Jerome follows the transliterating strategy, whereas Targum Jonathan renders appellatively throughout. Modern commentary is correspondingly unanimous on the appellative reading in the prophets: Wildberger, Blenkinsopp, Childs, and Goldingay on Isaiah (the third-person suffix at 10:18 and 37:24 rules out the toponym), Lundbom, Holladay, Carroll, and McKane on Jeremiah, Japhet and McKenzie on 2 Chronicles 26:10 (where korᵉmim and karmel make a paronomasia the KJV dissolved), Cogan and Tadmor on 2 Kings, and Milgrom, Levine, Wenham, and Hartley on the Leviticus grain texts (Milgrom, following m. Menahot 10:4, identifies barley). Two disagreements survive: Ernst Klein's Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary prints כַּרְמֶל I and II as separate lexemes, and Micah 7:14 is read as the toponym by Waltke, Andersen-Freedman, Hillers, and BDB against HALOT and the appellative tradition BDB traces to Wellhausen and G. A. Smith.

Where scholars disagree about karmel

Whether the fertile-land sense and the fresh-grain sense belong to one word used two ways or to two separate words that happen to look alike.

  • majorityOne word with two related senses, the grain being what the fertile land produces.; BDB, s.v. I. כַּרְמֶל, p. 502; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. כַּרְמֶל; DCH, ed. Clines, vol. 4 (1998), s.v. כַּרְמֶל; J. Hausmann, "כֶּרֶם," TDOT vol. VII (Eerdmans, 1995), 319-334
  • minorityTwo separate lexical entries, "garden land" and "fresh ears of grain", printed apart even though they go back to one root.; Ernst Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Carta, 1987), s.vv. כַּרְמֶל I and II
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. I. כַּרְמֶל, p. 502lexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. כַּרְמֶלlexicon
  • DCH (Dictionary of Classical Hebrew), ed. David J. A. Clines, vol. 4 (Sheffield, 1998), s.v. כַּרְמֶלlexicon
  • TWOT 1042a, in Harris, Archer, and Waltke, Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Moody, 1980)dictionary
  • J. Hausmann, "כֶּרֶם," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), vol. VII (Eerdmans, 1995), 319-334dictionary
  • Willem VanGemeren, ed., New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE) (Zondervan, 1997), under כֶּרֶםdictionary
  • Ernst Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Carta, 1987), s.vv. כַּרְמֶל I and IIlexicon
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (Doubleday, 1991), 192commentary
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 23-27, Anchor Bible 3B (Doubleday, 2001), on 23:14commentary
  • Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), on 2:14commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, The Book of Leviticus, NICOT (Eerdmans, 1979), on 2:14commentary
  • Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 1-12 and Isaiah 13-27, Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1991-1997), on 10:18 and 16:10commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, Anchor Bible 19 (Doubleday, 2000), on 10:18, 29:17, 32:15commentary
  • John Goldingay, Isaiah 1-39, ICC (T&T Clark, 2018), on 29:17 and 32:15commentary
  • Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 1-20, Anchor Bible 21A (Doubleday, 1999), on 2:7 and 4:26commentary
  • William L. Holladay, Jeremiah 1, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1986), on 2:7 and 4:26commentary
  • Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible 11 (Doubleday, 1988), on 4:42 and 19:23commentary
  • Sara Japhet, I and II Chronicles, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 1993), on 26:10commentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, A Commentary on Micah (Eerdmans, 2007), on 7:14commentary
  • Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Micah, Anchor Bible 24E (Doubleday, 2000), on 7:14commentary
  • Agnes Korn and Georg Warning, "Armenian karmir, Sogdian karmir 'red', Hebrew karmil and the Armenian Scale Insect Dye in Antiquity," in Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD (Zea Books, 2017), 173-187article
  • Joseph Ziegler, Untersuchungen zur Septuaginta des Buches Isaias (Aschendorff, 1934)monograph
  • J. Lust, E. Eynikel, and K. Hauspie (LEH) with T. Muraoka, Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, s.v. χίδρονlexicon

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

All attested forms of כַּרְמֶל

m s absolute

כַּרְמֶל

Lev 2:14, Lev 23:14, 2Ki 4:42, 2Ch 26:10, Isa 16:10, Isa 29:17, Isa 29:17, Isa 32:15

m s construct

כַּרְמִלּוֹ

2Ki 19:23, Isa 10:18, Isa 37:24