StrongerBible

na'ah

נָאָה

HebrewH4998“beautiful, comely, ...”

Appears 3 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Psa 93:5Sng 1:10Isa 52:7
Root family
Names & words formed with this
Word studyResearch-gradenah-AHverb

What na'ah means

to be lovely: to look right and pleasing, so that a thing is both beautiful and well suited to where it stands

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This verb holds together two ideas that English keeps apart: beauty and suitability. When the Hebrew poets say something is lovely, they usually mean that it fits. It is what it should be, where it should be, doing what it should do. Beauty here is rightness that you can see.

The same word is used of three very different things:

  • the ornamented cheeks of a woman being praised by her lover
  • the feet of a runner coming over the mountains with good news
  • the holiness that belongs to God's own house

For the first two, English translations reach for "beautiful" or "comely"; for the third, they say "befits." The Hebrew word never changes. What changes is which side of it the translator decided to show.

Every use of this word is in poetry: the Song of Songs, Isaiah, and the Psalms. It never turns up in a law, a list, or a story. That is a clue to its flavor. It belongs to elevated, careful speech, the kind that weighs whether a thing is worthy of the moment. The ordinary word for good looks (יָפֶה) simply says that something is pleasant to see; this one adds that it belongs where it is.

Nuances

1abeautiful to look at: a welcome, pleasing sight
TranslatabilityApproximate
Sng 1:10Isa 52:7
1bfitting: right and proper for a particular person, place, or occasion
Psa 93:5
Psa 93:5

How to read the phrase in Psalm 93:5 that the Masoretic text vocalizes נַאֲוָה־קֹדֶשׁ, and therefore whether the verse says that holiness suits God's house or that it beautifies it.

  • majority"Holiness befits your house." The form is a stative verb (or a predicate adjective) from נאה followed by the preposition of fittingness. The ancient versions converge here: the Septuagint has πρέπει ("it is fitting"), the Peshitta reads "holiness is fitting for your house," and Jerome's translation from the Hebrew has domum tuam decet sanctitas ("holiness befits your house").; Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. נָאָה; Septuagint, Psalm 92:5 (LXX)
  • minority"Holiness adorns your house." The form is felt to belong to the byform meaning "to beautify" (compare Exodus 15:2), so the line describes holiness as the temple's beauty rather than as what is suitable to it.; New International Version, Psalm 93:5; New Jerusalem Bible, Psalm 93:5
  • minorityThe line should be reconstructed differently, roughly "in your temple the holy ones will laud you," taking the house as heaven and the holy ones as divine beings. Most commentators have declined to follow this.; Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100, Anchor Bible 17 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968)

What scholars say about na'ah

BDB lists the verb as attested only in the Pilel, glossing it "be comely, befitting," and distributes its three occurrences between sense 1 "be comely" (Isaiah 52:7, of the messenger's feet; Song 1:10, of the cheeks) and sense 2 "be befitting" (Psalm 93:5). BDB derives the family not from a notion of dwelling but from אוה "to desire," so that the beautiful is the desirable. HALOT, DCH, and TDOT/TWAT all retain the double gloss; DCH treats נאה and נוה II as byforms both meaning "be beautiful" and adds the Ben Sira and Qumran attestations BDB lacks. No major lexicon posits a separate homonym meaning only "be fitting," so the propriety sense is normally taken as an extension of the aesthetic one rather than as a second root. The widely circulated derivation "properly to be at home, that is, by implication to be pleasant or suitable, that is, beautiful" is Strong's schema (H4998, TWOT 1271) and should be attributed as such: the secure comparative cognates (Arabic nawa, Sabaean nwy, Akkadian nawum or namum "steppe, pasture, nomadic encampment") belong to the dwelling root נוה, while the beauty sense rests chiefly on internal Hebrew evidence together with Late Hebrew and Aramaic, a distinction that illustrates Barr's caution about comparative philology. Morphologically the verb is defective, surviving only as נָאווּ (Isaiah 52:7; Song 1:10) and נַאֲוָה (Psalm 93:5), the latter best analyzed as a palel stative parallel to רַעֲנָן and שַׁאֲנָן and called by BDB an anomalous feminine; a predicate-adjective parse of the same consonants converges in sense. Distribution is entirely poetic and sapiential, which supports treating the word as an elevated literary term. The ancient versions bifurcate by context, using ὡραῖος at Isaiah 52:7 and πρέπει at Psalm 33:1, a split carried through the Vulgate (speciosa, decorus, decet) and into the citation of Isaiah 52:7 at Romans 10:15. Studies of biblical aesthetics (Penchansky, Avrahami) read this fusion of beauty and fittingness as characteristic of the Hebrew Bible rather than as an accident of this one root.

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

  • Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), s.v. נָאָה and נָאוֶהlexicon
  • Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, rev. Walter Baumgartner and Johann Jakob Stamm, 5 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), s.v. נאהlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, 8 vols. (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), s.v. נאהlexicon
  • G. Johannes Botterweck, Helmer Ringgren, and Heinz-Josef Fabry, eds., Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1974-2006)theological dictionary
  • Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100, Anchor Bible 17 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968)commentary
  • John Goldingay and David Payne, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Isaiah 40-55, 2 vols., International Critical Commentary (London: T&T Clark, 2006)commentary
  • Tremper Longman III, Song of Songs, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001)commentary
  • James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968)monograph
  • David Penchansky, "Beauty, Power, and Attraction: Aesthetics in the Hebrew Bible," in Beauty and the Bible: Toward a Hermeneutics of Biblical Aesthetics, ed. Richard J. Bautch and Jean-Francois Racine, Semeia Studies 73 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2013)essay
  • Yael Avrahami, The Senses of Scripture: Sensory Perception in the Hebrew Bible, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 545 (New York: T&T Clark, 2012)monograph

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

All attested forms of נָאָה

piel perfect 3cp

נָאווּ, נָּאווּ

Sng 1:10, Isa 52:7

piel perfect 3ms

נַאֲוָה

Psa 93:5