StrongerBible

nevalah

נְבָלָה

HebrewH5039“folly, outrage, ...”

Appears 13 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 34:7Deu 22:21Jos 7:15Jdg 19:23Jdg 19:24Jdg 20:6Jdg 20:101Sa 25:252Sa 13:12Job 42:8Isa 9:17(16)Isa 32:6Jer 29:23
Root family
Word studyneh-vah-LAHnoun

What nevalah means

an outrage: an act so shameful that the community cannot absorb it and must answer it

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This is the strongest word the Hebrew Bible has for something that must never be done. It is not a word for a mistake, a poor decision, or a lack of sense. It is reserved for the acts that tear a community apart: the rape of Dinah, Achan's theft of what had been set apart for God, the night of horror at Gibeah, Amnon's assault on his own sister. In most of those scenes the narrator adds the same fixed phrase, "an outrage in Israel," and the sentence that follows is death or expulsion.

One word covers four settings:

  • a sexual crime that shames a family and a nation
  • the theft of what belongs to God alone
  • speech that insults God or ruins other people
  • the fixed character of a man who lives this way

What holds them together is not the kind of act but its standing. In each case someone has crossed a line the community treats as the outer edge of what a person may do, and the response is not correction but removal.

Because the word names conduct, it has a natural partner in נָבָל, the person who behaves this way. Abigail sets the two side by side when she tells David that her husband's name is Nabal and that outrage travels with him. In the prophets and in Job the word shifts from the hand to the mouth: Isaiah's ruined nation has every mouth speaking it, and God tells Job's friends that they have not spoken rightly of him.

Nuances

1aa sexual crime that disgraces a family and the whole nation, announced with the verdict that such a thing must not be done in Israel
Gen 34:7Deu 22:21Jdg 19:23Jdg 19:24Jdg 20:6Jdg 20:102Sa 13:12Jer 29:23
1bsacrilege: taking or profaning what has been set apart as God's own
Jos 7:15
1coutrageous speech: words that insult God or leave the helpless with nothing
Job 42:8Isa 9:17(16)Isa 32:6
1doutrageousness as a settled trait: what a person is known to carry with him
1Sa 25:25

Disputed

Whether the term is primarily a technical legal category of Israelite covenant law or primarily a social category of honor and shame.

  • contestedPrimarily juridical: נְבָלָה denotes serious disorderly and unruly conduct constituting a fundamental breach of the covenant order, and the formula עָשָׂה נְבָלָה בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל functions as a technical declaration of a capital or excisional offence.; Anthony Phillips, "NEBALAH: A Term for Serious Disorderly and Unruly Conduct," Vetus Testamentum 25 (1975): 237-242; Carolyn Pressler, The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws, BZAW 216 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1993); Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1996), on 22:21
  • contestedPrimarily sociological: the נָבָל is a figure socially, morally, and religiously out of place, and נְבָלָה names order-shattering, sacrilegious behavior that shames the whole collective, with honor and shame rather than statute as the operative frame.; W. M. W. Roth, "NBL," Vetus Testamentum 10 (1960): 394-409; Saul M. Olyan, "Honor, Shame, and Covenant Relations in Ancient Israel and Its Environment," Journal of Biblical Literature 115 (1996): 201-218; Lyn M. Bechtel, "Shame as a Sanction of Social Control in Biblical Israel," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 49 (1991): 47-76

What scholars say about nevalah

The lexica treat נְבָלָה as the abstract noun beside נָבָל, glossed by BDB as "disgraceful folly," especially of sins of unchastity, of profane action (Joshua 7:15), of inhospitable churlishness (1 Samuel 25:25), and of senseless and irreligious language (Isaiah 9:16 in Hebrew numbering; 32:6); HALOT and DCH prefer formal homonyms of the consonantal sequence נבל while preserving the same distribution of senses. The decisive modern treatments are W. M. W. Roth, "NBL," VT 10 (1960): 394-409, who argued that the נָבָל is a figure socially, morally, and religiously out of place rather than a cognitive failure, and Anthony Phillips, "NEBALAH," VT 25 (1975): 237-242, who recast the analysis juridically: נְבָלָה denotes serious disorderly and unruly conduct, and the formula עָשָׂה נְבָלָה בְּיִשְׂרָאֵל is a technical declaration of covenant rupture. Johannes Marböck's TDOT article endorses both Roth's semantic field and Phillips's formula as the standard synthesis, and treats the noun as continuous with the verbal sense "wither, droop." Commentary on each occurrence presupposes this framework: Wenham, Sarna, and Hamilton on Genesis 34:7; Tigay, Weinfeld, and Nelson on Deuteronomy 22:21; Butler, Hess, and Boling on Joshua 7:15; Block, Butler, and Webb on the fivefold concentration in Judges 19-20, read as the marker of Israel's moral collapse; McCarter, Alter, and Anderson on 2 Samuel 13:12, where Tamar's protest deliberately quotes the Genesis 34 formula; Lundbom and Holladay on Jeremiah 29:23 (LXX 36:23), where adultery plus false prophecy is labelled with the Pentateuchal formula. On 1 Samuel 25:25 the consensus since Jon Levenson, "1 Samuel 25 as Literature and as History," CBQ 40 (1978): 11-28, reads Nabal's name as a literary imposition rather than a birth name, with Abigail's etymology functioning at once apologetically and as a covert death sentence. The LXX renders the noun with the ἄφρων/ἀφροσύνη family in the Psalter and wisdom books, but is contextually sensitive in narrative and legal texts: ἀσχημοσύνη at Genesis 34:7, ἀνομία/ἀνόμημα at Joshua 7:15 and Jeremiah 36:23, μωρά at Isaiah 32:6. The near-mechanical Greek reduction to ἄφρων is widely held responsible for the later Christian reading of the word as intellectual foolishness.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. נְבָלָהlexicon
  • HALOT II:663-664, s.v. נְבָלָהlexicon
  • DCH V:586-595, s.v. נבלlexicon
  • W. M. W. Roth, "NBL," Vetus Testamentum 10 (1960): 394-409article
  • Anthony Phillips, "NEBALAH: A Term for Serious Disorderly and Unruly Conduct," Vetus Testamentum 25 (1975): 237-242article
  • J. Marböck, "נָבָל nābāl; נְבָלָה nəbālāh," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. IX (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 157-171reference
  • Bruce K. Waltke, art. "nābāl," in Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1980)reference
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1996)commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (WBC 2; Dallas: Word, 1994), on 34:7commentary
  • Daniel I. Block, Judges, Ruth (NAC; Nashville: B&H, 1999), on 19-20commentary
  • P. Kyle McCarter, Jr., I Samuel (AB 8; Garden City: Doubleday, 1980), 388-402commentary
  • Jon D. Levenson, "1 Samuel 25 as Literature and as History," Catholic Biblical Quarterly 40 (1978): 11-28article
  • Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21-36 (AB 21B; New York: Doubleday, 2004), on 29:23commentary
  • Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 28-39: A Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002), on 32:5-6commentary

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

All attested forms of נְבָלָה

f s absolute

נְבָלָה, נְּבָלָה

Gen 34:7, Deu 22:21, Jos 7:15, Jdg 20:6, 1Sa 25:25, Job 42:8, Isa 9:17, Isa 32:6