seah: a fixed dry measure for grain and flour, a third of the larger standard measure and roughly seven litres
A seah is an amount you can carry, not a weight you put on scales. It sits at the everyday scale of Israelite food: what a cook fetches from the storeroom, what gets kneaded into dough, what a trader calls out at the city gate. Reckoned against the other units, as later Jewish sources set them out, three seahs make one of the larger standard measure (אֵיפָה) and six of the small measure (קַב) make one seah. In modern terms that is somewhere near seven litres, about two dry gallons, but the figure is reconstructed from indirect evidence rather than known.
The measure turns up in three ordinary settings, and the pattern is worth seeing:
- Baking for guests: Abraham tells Sarah to knead three seahs of the best flour for three visitors (Genesis 18:6), which is a very large batch, not a quick snack.
- Provisions loaded for a journey: Abigail packs five seahs of roasted grain onto donkeys alongside bread, wine, raisins and pressed figs (1 Samuel 25:18).
- Prices quoted in a market: Elisha announces that by the next day a seah of the best flour will go for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel, and the starving city finds it exactly so (2 Kings 7:1, 16, 18).
One use stands apart from the rest. The trench Elijah digs around his rebuilt altar on Mount Carmel is sized by "a house of two seahs of seed" (1 Kings 18:32). That phrase has been read two ways: either the ditch would hold about two seahs, or it enclosed a patch of ground that two seahs of seed would sow. Later Jewish law used the same wording as a settled way of naming a plot of land, which gives the second reading real weight, though most modern Bibles print the first.
The word outlived Hebrew. Greek borrowed it whole as σάτον, so when Jesus describes a woman working yeast into "three measures" of flour (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:21), she is handling the same quantity Sarah was.