StrongerBible

aqar

עָקָר

HebrewH6135“barren, childless”

Appears 12 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 11:30Gen 25:21Gen 29:31Exo 23:26Deu 7:14 (2×)Jdg 13:2Jdg 13:31Sa 2:5Job 24:21Psa 113:9Isa 54:1
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeah-KAHRadjective

What aqar means

barren: unable to bring forth young, so that no child is ever born

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word names one condition: no children have come, and, left as things are, none will. It is not the word for grief over a child who has died or been lost, which Hebrew handles separately (שַׁכּוּל), and it is not a general word for bleakness or desolation (גַּלְמוּד). It is the plain description of someone who has borne nothing.

It belongs to a family of words built around the idea of a root or a base. The same root gives a verb used for tearing a plant up by the roots and for crippling a captured warhorse by cutting the tendon at the base of its leg (עִקֵּר). Scholars disagree about how the picture travelled from roots to childlessness, but the family connection itself is not in doubt. One line in Deuteronomy also settles a common misunderstanding: the promise there covers a barren man as well as a barren woman, and the livestock too. So this is not by definition a word about women, even though every other place it appears it does describe a woman.

Almost everywhere it turns up, it is the setup for a reversal:

  • three of the four great mothers in Genesis are introduced with this single word, and each of them eventually bears a son
  • the covenant blessing in Exodus and Deuteronomy promises that no one in the land will be in this condition
  • Hannah's song and Psalm 113 make the childless woman the picture of how God turns situations upside down
  • Isaiah tells a ruined city, addressed as a childless woman, to break out singing because her children will outnumber the married woman's

The one exception is in Job, where a childless woman appears not as a story waiting to turn but as someone easy to prey on, a woman with no grown sons to stand up for her. That verse is the reminder that behind the reversals lies a real and dangerous social position.

Nuances

1aa particular woman described as unable to bear children, the note that sets her story in motion
Gen 11:30Gen 25:21Gen 29:31Jdg 13:2Jdg 13:3
1bunable to bring forth young, said of a people and their animals together, as the condition covenant blessing promises to remove
TranslatabilityPartial
Exo 23:26Deu 7:14 (2×)
1cthe childless woman herself, named simply by her condition
1Sa 2:5Job 24:21Psa 113:9Isa 54:1
Isa 54:1

Whether the childless woman of Isaiah 54:1 is a deliberate identification of Zion with Sarah, or a broader use of the childless-woman figure fused with the image of the deserted city.

  • contestedA specific Sarah typology: the prophet uses the very word applied to Sarah and has already named her three chapters earlier, so Zion is being cast as the new Sarah.; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Bible 19A, 2002), 359-363; Benjamin D. Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66 (Stanford, 1998)
  • contestedA wider reappropriation of the childless-woman tradition, in which the matriarchs are one strand among others and the desolate-city image remains distinguishable from the barren matriarch.; Mary Callaway, Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash (SBLDS 91; Scholars Press, 1986), 59-88; Kamila Blessing, Desolate Jerusalem and Barren Matriarch, Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 18 (1998): 47-69

What scholars say about aqar

The dossier is unusually tight on meaning and unusually divided on derivation. HALOT keeps everything under one lemma and glosses the adjective as "infertile, with no descendants," cross-referencing the verbal sense of tearing out roots. BDB (785-786) calls the underlying meaning "dubious," treats the verbs as denominative from a noun *ʿiqr- "root," and derives the intensive "hamstring" from a postulated *ʿēqer "root-sinew," a path distinct from "uproot." Gesenius derived "barren" from a violent anatomical stage, glossing it "to have the testicles extirpated" and comparing סָרַס, appealing specifically to the unique masculine form in Deut 7:14. Clines's DCH, by synchronic editorial policy, lemmatizes עקר I "pluck up" and עקר II "sterilize, castrate, hamstring" as homographs; Klein does the same while conceding that II is "probably a special sense development" from I. No lexicon defends a genuinely homonymous "barren" root cut off from the root and uproot family, so even the DCH split is presentational. Comparative Semitics tips toward one root: classical Arabic lexicography (Lane, Ibn Manzur) holds ʿ-q-r together across "hamstring," ʿāqir "barren," and ʿaqār "landed property, root-stock," while there is no secure Akkadian cognate (aqāru "be precious" belongs to *w/yqr), which is why Kogan and Militarev do not reconstruct *ʿqr for Proto-Semitic. Biblical Aramaic ʿiqqar "root, stump" (Dan 4:12, 20, 23) and Syriac ʿaqartā "barren woman" fill out the nominal side; Wellhausen's Reste arabischen Heidentums documented the Arabic funerary practice BDB invokes for the "hamstring" sense. The LXX renders the adjective uniformly with steira, and that consistency is what later enabled the typological chain from Sarah to Zion to Elizabeth (Luke 1:7, 36; Gal 4:27). On the literary and theological side, Callaway's Sing, O Barren One argues that Second Isaiah's reuse of the exact descriptor applied to Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel is deliberate inner-biblical reappropriation making Zion the new Sarah; Alter supplies the formal category of the annunciation type-scene and insists that variation from the convention is exegetically decisive; Fuchs and Exum read the pattern as a narrative strategy binding women's worth to childbearing, while Frymer-Kensky and Havrelock read it as the structural correlate of monotheism; Moss and Baden argue that biblical narrative treats infertility as a default condition requiring divine intervention rather than an aberration requiring cure, which removes theological blame from the infertile. Two verses carry text-critical weight. In Job 24:21 the opening participle roʿeh has been derived from raʿah I "shepherd" and from raʿaʿ "injure," and emended by Duhm to roʿets "crush," with LXX and Vulgate diverging; Clines catalogs the emendation history and generally retains MT in the sense "prey upon," while the parallel with the widow secures the sociological reading of the childless woman as a vulnerable social type. In Psalm 113:9 Hossfeld, Zenger, Kraus, and Goldingay read the phrase as "the barren woman of the house" rather than "the mistress of the house," and show the psalm drawing on 1 Sam 2:5 and in turn shaping the Magnificat.

Where scholars disagree about aqar

Whether the adjective "barren" belongs to the same word family as the verb meaning to uproot and to hamstring, or is better presented as a separate homograph.

  • majorityOne root family. The adjective, the verb for uprooting, the noun for an offshoot, and the Aramaic word for a root-stump all belong together, anchored in the idea of a root or base; the Arabic evidence, where one classical root carries hamstringing, barrenness, and landed property together, is treated as decisive.; HALOT, s.v. עָקָר; BDB, s.v. עקר, 785-786; H. Ringgren, ʿaqar, in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 11; Robin Wakely, עקר, in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 3
  • minorityTwo homographs listed separately, one for plucking up and one for sterilizing or hamstringing. This is a lexicographic decision to describe usage without arbitrating origins rather than a claim that two historically distinct roots existed.; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. עקר I and עקר II; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, s.v. עקר

How the sense "barren" arose within that family: from a plant picture of being torn up by the roots, or from a violent anatomical sense of cutting at the base of the reproductive organs.

  • majorityA botanical picture. The barren person is imagined as a stock torn out at the root, with no shoot rising from it; this reading fits the planting and uprooting imagery used elsewhere of Israel's fortunes.; HALOT, s.v. עָקָר; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, s.v. עקר
  • minorityA violent anatomical origin, literally having the testicles extirpated, compared with the Hebrew verb for castration; the argument leans on the sole masculine attestation in Deuteronomy 7:14, which is easier to derive from cutting than from a plant image.; Gesenius, Hebraisches und aramaisches Handworterbuch, s.v. עקר (ET Tregelles)
  • minorityThe underlying meaning is dubious and should not be reconstructed. The verbs are denominative from a noun meaning "root," and the hamstringing sense comes by a separate path from a postulated noun for the root-sinew of the leg.; BDB, s.v. עקר, 785-786
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

  • HALOT, s.v. עָקָרlexicon
  • BDB, s.v. עקר, 785-786lexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebraisches und aramaisches Handworterbuch, s.v. עקר (ET Tregelles)lexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. עקר I and עקר IIlexicon
  • Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language, s.v. עקרlexicon
  • H. Ringgren, ʿaqar, in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 11theological-dictionary
  • Robin Wakely, עקר, in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 3theological-dictionary
  • Edward W. Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, s.v. عقرlexicon
  • Leonid Kogan, Proto-Semitic Lexicon, in Weninger, ed., The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook (De Gruyter, 2011)article
  • Julius Wellhausen, Reste arabischen Heidentums, 2nd ed., 181monograph
  • Mary Callaway, Sing, O Barren One: A Study in Comparative Midrash (SBLDS 91; Scholars Press, 1986)monograph
  • Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (Basic Books, 1981), ch. 3monograph
  • Robert Alter, How Convention Helps Us Read: The Case of the Bible's Annunciation Type-Scenes, Prooftexts 3 (1983): 115-130article
  • Candida R. Moss and Joel S. Baden, Reconceiving Infertility: Biblical Perspectives on Procreation and Childlessness (Princeton, 2015)monograph
  • Tikva Frymer-Kensky, In the Wake of the Goddesses (Free Press, 1992)monograph
  • Esther Fuchs, The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible, Semeia 46 (1989): 151-166article
  • J. Cheryl Exum, Fragmented Women (JSOTSup 163, 1993), ch. 4monograph
  • Rachel Havrelock, The Myth of Birthing a Hero, Biblical Interpretation 16.2 (2008): 154-178article
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15 (Word Biblical Commentary 1, 1987), 272commentary
  • Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989)commentary
  • Jeffrey H. Tigay, Deuteronomy (JPS Torah Commentary, 1996), 88commentary
  • Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford, 1972)monograph
  • William H. C. Propp, Exodus 19-40 (Anchor Bible 2A, 2006)commentary
  • P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel (Anchor Bible 8, 1980), 68-76commentary
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37 (Word Biblical Commentary 18A, 2006), 601-620commentary
  • Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 3 (Hermeneia, 2011), 183-189commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Bible 19A, 2002), 359-363commentary
  • Benjamin D. Sommer, A Prophet Reads Scripture: Allusion in Isaiah 40-66 (Stanford, 1998)monograph

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

All attested forms of עָקָר

f s absolute

עֲקָרָה

Gen 11:30, Gen 25:21, Gen 29:31, Exo 23:26, Deu 7:14, Jdg 13:2, Jdg 13:3, 1Sa 2:5

f s construct

עֲקֶרֶת

Psa 113:9

m s absolute

עָקָר

Deu 7:14