StrongerBible

arev

עָרֵב

HebrewH6156sweet, pleasant

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Pro 20:17Sng 2:14
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeah-RAYVadjective

What arev means

pleasing to take in: sweet on the tongue or lovely to the ear, named for the pleasure it gives the one receiving it

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word describes something from the receiver's side. It does not name a flavor or a tone of voice; it says that whatever is being tasted or heard goes down well with the person taking it in. That is why one small word can cover both a mouthful of bread and the sound of someone speaking.

Both of its appearances turn on that pleasure. In Proverbs, food got by cheating tastes good at first, and the saying grants that for half a line before pulling the rug out: the same mouth ends up full of grit. In the Song of Songs a man asks the woman to speak because her voice is a delight to him, and the line sets that pleasure beside the loveliness of her face.

The closely related verb is used far more often, of sleep that comes easily, of a longing finally satisfied, and of an offering that God finds acceptable. Keeping that wider family in view helps, because the thread running through all of it is that something is welcome to whoever receives it. Hebrew has near neighbors that stop short of the same thing, such as מָתוֹק, which names sweetness as a flavor, and נָעִים, which names loveliness or charm in a much broader way.

Nuances

1asweet on the tongue: food that tastes good going down
Pro 20:17
1blovely to the ear: a voice or sound that is a pleasure to listen to
Sng 2:14

What scholars say about arev

The standard lexica list עָרֵב as an adjective "sweet, pleasant" at Prov 20:17 and Song 2:14, the stative counterpart of the verb BDB numbers ערב III "be sweet, pleasing" (Prov 3:24; 13:19; Jer 6:20; 31:26; Mal 3:4; Hos 9:4; Ps 104:34). HALOT supplies the fuller comparative material from Ugaritic and Akkadian, and DCH, working from the whole classical corpus down through Ben Sira and the Scrolls, is the most willing of the three to multiply homonymous entries for the ערב material. The live lexicographic question is not what the adjective means but how many roots the consonantal string ע-ר-ב conceals. The older Gesenius tradition, and Klein after it, derived "be sweet" from a single primitive root "to braid, intermix" by way of "well mixed, hence agreeable"; BDB isolates the stative as a homonym in its own right, and most later lexicographers follow. Comparative Semitics sharpens the wider problem without settling this corner of it: proto-Semitic *ʿ and *ġ merged in Hebrew and Aramaic while Arabic and Ugaritic keep them apart, which separates "evening, west" (Arabic ġarb) and "raven" (ġurāb) from "pledge, mix, Arab" (ʿarab, ʿurbūn), though Kogan notes that Ugaritic writes the "enter, set" root with ʿayin (ʿrb špš), the standing counter-datum. Arabic offers no clean cognate for the "sweet" stative, so the phoneme test cannot adjudicate its affiliation, and Barr's caution against recovering Hebrew senses from cognates applies with force here. In Prov 20:17 the saying's rhetoric depends on conceding the sweetness in the first colon so that the gravel of the second may overturn it; the immediately preceding v. 16 uses the homonymous ערב "stand surety," so two like-sounding roots stand in adjacent verses of the collection. Ben Sira's causative יעריבו (Sir 40:21) and the Aramaic adjective עָרִיב "pleasant" carry the stative on into later usage.

Where scholars disagree about arev

Whether the words meaning "be sweet, pleasing" form a root of their own or grew out of the root meaning "to mix, exchange."

  • majorityA separate word that merely shares its spelling with the "mix" and "stand surety" words. BDB gives the stative its own numbered entry, and most current lexicographers keep it apart.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. ערב III; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. ערב
  • minorityA development of one primitive root "to braid, intermix," so that what is well mixed or duly arranged is what turns out to be agreeable.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. ערב; Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (Carta, 1987), s.v. ערב
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), s.v. עָרֵב adj. and ערב IIIlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), s.v. ערבlexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. ערבlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. ערבlexicon
  • Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language for Readers of English (Carta, 1987), s.v. ערבlexicon
  • Leonid Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic: The Lexical Isoglosses (De Gruyter, 2015)monograph
  • James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford University Press, 1968)monograph
  • Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, Anchor Yale Bible 18B (Yale University Press, 2009)commentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 15-31, NICOT (Eerdmans, 2005)commentary
  • TDOT (Botterweck, Ringgren, Fabry, eds.), s.v. ערבtheological dictionary

All attested forms of עָרֵב

m s absolute

עָרֵב

Pro 20:17, Sng 2:14