StrongerBible

lu'a

לוּעַ

HebrewH3886“swallow down, rash, ...”

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Job 6:3Oba 1:16
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeLOO-ahverb

What lu'a means

1

to swallow, to gulp something all the way down the throat

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong

This is a rare verb for taking something down the throat. It sits beside the noun for the throat itself (לֹעַ), the part of the body that does the gulping, and beside a verb for wolfing food down (לָעַט). The family is concrete and physical: mouth, throat, and what goes through them.

Its one clear appearance comes in Obadiah, where the nations are handed the cup of God's judgment and made to drink it. The line pairs the word with drinking, so the picture is of draining a cup to the bottom: they drink, and they gulp it down. That pairing is the main reason scholars are confident about the sense here.

Hebrew has a far commoner word for swallowing something up (בָּלַע), used when the ground swallows rebels or when an enemy devours a nation. The rare word here is narrower and more bodily. It is the throat doing its work, not the idea of destroying something by consuming it.

Oba 1:16
2

to talk wildly: to let words out faster than thought can weigh them

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

Job's reply to his friends opens by conceding that his earlier outburst got away from him. His grief, he says, is heavier than the sand of the sea, and that is why his words have come out the way they did. Most scholars today take the verb to describe speech that runs ahead of thought, blurted rather than measured.

That reading is probable rather than proven. It rests mainly on a comparison with an Arabic verb meaning "to talk nonsense", and the consonants of the two words do not correspond in the way they normally do between the two languages. The ancient translators were already divided about the line: the old Greek version called Job's words "worthless", Jerome's Latin made them "full of grief", and an Aramaic version had them simply fail him.

One more verse is usually discussed alongside this one, Proverbs 20:25, where a person blurts out "Holy!" as a vow and only afterward stops to think about it. The Hebrew word printed there is spelled differently and is counted separately (יָלַע), but interpreters treat the two together because the sense in question is the same.

Job 6:3
Job 6:3

Which sense the verb carries in Job 6:3.

  • majority"My words have been wild or rash." Job concedes that his opening lament was intemperate and points to the weight of his suffering as the reason.; D. J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, Word Biblical Commentary (1989), 158; E. Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, 76; R. Gordis, The Book of Job (1978); N. C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Library (1985); J. E. Hartley, The Book of Job, NICOT (1988)
  • minority"My words are swallowed up." Grief chokes off the speech, taking the verb from the swallowing root instead.; King James Version (1611), following the older interpretive tradition
  • minority"My words are full of grief." A separate root meaning to be in pain, which suits Job's anguish and agrees with the Latin of Jerome.; C.-L. Seow, Job 1-21, Illuminations (2013); Vulgate, Job 6:3 (verba mea dolore sunt plena)

What scholars say about lu'a

The standard lexica divide these consonants between two roots: לוע I "swallow, gulp down", whose only clear verbal attestation is Obadiah 16 and whose nominal derivative is לֹעַ "throat" (Proverbs 23:2), and לוע II "talk wildly", assigned to Job 6:3 and, in the form יָלַע, to Proverbs 20:25. BDB frames the split, and HALOT and DCH follow it in substance. Root I is anchored by Syriac lʿ "lick, chew, swallow" and by the inner-Hebrew cluster לָעַט "swallow greedily" and עִלֵּעַ "lick up"; Gesenius, following Michaelis, treated the syllable as onomatopoeic. Root II rests on Arabic laghā "to talk idly", proposed by Bacher (ZDMG 12 [1887], 605, 614) and adopted by BDB, Gesenius and Delitzsch, but Arabic ghayn does not correspond regularly to Hebrew ayin, and BDB itself hedges by floating a possible root לעה. At Proverbs 20:25 BDB calls the construction of יָלַע "unusual, and perhaps [a] text error"; Delitzsch reads it as an abbreviated imperfect and takes קֹדֶשׁ as a blurted vow-formula, comparing κορβᾶν in Mark 7:11, a reading followed by Fox, Waltke, Clifford and Murphy against the older "devour what is holy" of Jerome and Luther. Modern Job commentary (Clines, Dhorme, Gordis, Habel, Hartley) renders Job 6:3 "my words have been wild", while Seow and Sutcliffe connect a root meaning "be in pain", comparing Arabic lāʿa and agreeing with Jerome's dolore sunt plena. The ancient versions preserve the entire disagreement: the Septuagint and Targum favor the vain-speech or rash-vow sense, while the Vulgate (devorare) and Aquila (καταπίεται) keep a swallowing reading. Barr's Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (1968) is the standing methodological caution against resting a Hebrew sense on a phonologically imperfect Arabic equation, and this root is a textbook case of the problem.

Where scholars disagree about lu'a

Whether these letters stand for two different words, one meaning "to swallow" and one meaning "to talk wildly", and how secure the second one is.

  • majorityTwo separate words share the same spelling. One means "to swallow", with the noun for "throat" beside it in Proverbs 23:2; the other means "to talk wildly" and turns up only in Job 6:3 and Proverbs 20:25.; BDB (Brown, Driver, Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. לוע I, לוע II; HALOT (Koehler and Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. לוע; DCH (D. J. A. Clines, ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. IV, s.v. לוע; F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, on Proverbs 20:25
  • minorityThe "talk wildly" sense is a probable inference rather than an established meaning, because it rests almost entirely on an Arabic verb whose consonants do not correspond regularly to the Hebrew ones. BDB itself hedges by proposing a different root, and comparative evidence of this kind needs testing rather than assuming.; J. Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968); BDB (Brown, Driver, Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. לוע II (hedging toward a root לעה)
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. לוע I, לוע II, לֹעַlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler and Baumgartner), The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. לועlexicon
  • DCH (D. J. A. Clines, ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. IV, s.v. לועlexicon
  • W. Gesenius, Hebraisches und aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, s.v. לועlexicon
  • F. Delitzsch, Biblical Commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, on Proverbs 20:25commentary
  • D. J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, Word Biblical Commentary (1989), 158commentary
  • E. Dhorme, A Commentary on the Book of Job, 76commentary
  • C.-L. Seow, Job 1-21, Illuminations (2013)commentary
  • M. V. Fox, Proverbs, Anchor Yale Biblecommentary
  • B. K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, NICOTcommentary
  • R. J. Clifford, Proverbs, Old Testament Librarycommentary
  • W. Bacher, ZDMG 12 (1887), 605, 614article
  • J. Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968)monograph
  • W. D. Reyburn and E. M. Fry, A Handbook on Proverbs, UBS Handbook Series (2000)handbook

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

All attested forms of לוּעַ

qal consecutive-perfect 3cp

וְלָעוּ

Oba 1:16

qal perfect 3cp

לָעוּ

Job 6:3