StrongerBible

orev

עֹרֵב

HebrewH6158“raven”

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 8:7Lev 11:15Deu 14:141Ki 17:41Ki 17:6Job 38:41Psa 147:9Pro 30:17Sng 5:11Isa 34:11
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeoh-RAYVnoun

What orev means

the raven: a large, glossy black scavenging bird of cliffs and wastelands, and in the food laws the whole crow family named after it.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The raven is one bird, but the Bible puts it to work in strikingly opposite ways, and that range is what makes the word worth stopping over.

  • It is ruled out as food, because it feeds on dead bodies and so lives in constant contact with blood.
  • It is the first bird Noah lets go from the ark, flying out over the water and back until the ground dries, ahead of the dove (יוֹנָה).
  • It is the courier God uses to keep Elijah alive beside a drying stream, bringing him bread and meat morning and evening.
  • Its chicks are the picture God reaches for when he asks Job who feeds the young that cry out to him.
  • It pecks out the eye of the child who mocks his parents, and it moves into a ruined city where no one lives anymore.
  • Its feathers, which are not dull but shining blue-black, supply the image for a young man's hair in a love song.

What holds these together is not one hidden idea but a habit of Hebrew storytelling. The raven belongs to the edges: cliff faces above dry streambeds, ruins, carcasses, the open country beyond where people bury their dead. A creature of the edges can be turned against the moral order or, more surprisingly, pressed into its service, and the biblical writers do both.

In the food laws the word works a little differently. "Every raven of its kind" is a heading rather than a single species: it gathers ravens, crows, jackdaws, and rooks under one name. Israel's bird lists group by family names like this, so a reader there should hear a whole category, not one bird.

Nuances

1aa raven: the actual bird, whether one of them or a flock.
TranslatabilityDirect
Gen 8:71Ki 17:41Ki 17:6Job 38:41Psa 147:9Pro 30:17Sng 5:11Isa 34:11
1Ki 17:4

Whether Elijah at the wadi was fed by ravens or by people, since the same consonants can be read as "Arabs."

  • majorityBy ravens. The whole point of the story is that God feeds his prophet through a bird Israel is forbidden even to eat, during a drought Baal could not stop.; Mordechai Cogan, I Kings, Anchor Bible 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 425-27; Marvin A. Sweeney, I and II Kings, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 210-12; Iain W. Provan, 1 and 2 Kings, New International Biblical Commentary (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), 132-34
  • minorityBy people. Reading the consonants as "Arabs" gives local desert dwellers who brought Elijah supplies, a proposal with a long history in Jewish tradition.; John Gray, I and II Kings, 3rd ed., Old Testament Library (London: SCM, 1977), 379-80
1bthe crow family as a whole: every bird of this kind, in the lists of what Israel may not eat.
Lev 11:15Deu 14:14

What scholars say about orev

The standard lexicons agree that the word denotes the raven and, by extension, the corvid family; the referent is not in dispute. HALOT, the eighteenth edition of Gesenius, and the Semitic Etymological Dictionary of Militarev and Kogan treat it as an independent lexeme, reconstructed to Proto-Semitic *ghurayb- (Fronzaroli preferred *gharib-), on the evidence of Arabic ghurab, Akkadian aribu, Eblaite ha-ri-bu, Syriac urba, and the Modern South Arabian forms that still preserve the initial velar fricative lost in Canaanite. The older derivation from the root behind "evening, dusky," found in BDB and TWOT, is rejected on that comparative evidence, and the word is widely held to be onomatopoeic, alongside Latin corvus and Greek korax. The Masoretic vocalization of the participial pattern keeps this lexeme distinct from the several unrelated homographs written with the same consonants. G. R. Driver identified eight Palestinian corvids under the "after its kind" formula of Leviticus 11:15 and Deuteronomy 14:14, and Whitekettle has argued that the formula names a genuine Israelite taxonomic category; Milgrom explains the exclusion by the Priestly concern with blood, a rationale Douglas came to prefer over her earlier account of the bird as a category anomaly. On Genesis 8:7 the Septuagint and Old Latin imply the raven did not return, while the Masoretic Text and Samaritan Pentateuch imply repeated flights; Marcus reads the phrase as a merism for "to and fro," and Moberly hears in the flight an echo of the divine wind over the waters in Genesis 1:2. At 1 Kings 17:4 and 17:6 the revocalization to "Arabs," known from rabbinic tradition and noted sympathetically by Gray, is not accepted in current critical commentary (Cogan, Sweeney, Provan), which reads the scandal of an unclean courier as the theological point. On Job 38:41 and Psalm 147:9, Clines, Habel, Kraus, and Hossfeld and Zenger note the provocation of choosing the unclean bird as the object of divine provision. On Proverbs 30:17, Fox and Waltke observe that scavengers take the softest tissue first and that the horror of the saying lies in the denial of burial, while Feliks documents the wadi-cliff nesting that makes the idiom ornithologically exact. On Song of Songs 5:11, Pope and Exum stress the iridescence of raven plumage and the freedom of love poetry from cultic associations. On Isaiah 34:11, Wildberger and Blenkinsopp read the bird as part of a stock curse-list of desolation returning the land to pre-creation chaos.

Where scholars disagree about orev

Whether the Hebrew word for raven belongs to the same root as the words for evening and dusk, or is an independent word that only came to look like them.

  • majorityAn independent word. Arabic, Akkadian, and the Modern South Arabian languages preserve a first consonant that Hebrew later lost, and in those languages the raven word and the sunset word are plainly separate; their identical spelling in Hebrew is an accident of sound change.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), 2:879, s.v. עֹרֵב; W. Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. R. Meyer, H. Donner, U. Ruterswarden (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2013), s.v. עֹרֵב; A. Militarev and L. Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary, vol. 2: Animal Names (AOAT 278/2; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005), s.v. *ghurayb-
  • minorityA derivative of the evening or dusky root, so that the bird is named for its dark color. This is the older lexicographical tradition.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), 788, s.v. עֹרֵב; R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, B. K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1980), section 1690a
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 (Koehler-Baumgartner-Stamm), 2:879, s.v. עֹרֵבlexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), 788, s.v. עֹרֵבlexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), vol. 6, s.v. עֹרֵבlexicon
  • W. Gesenius, Hebraisches und Aramaisches Handworterbuch uber das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. R. Meyer, H. Donner, U. Ruterswarden (Berlin: Springer, 1987-2013), s.v. עֹרֵבlexicon
  • A. Militarev and L. Kogan, Semitic Etymological Dictionary, vol. 2: Animal Names (AOAT 278/2; Munster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2005), s.v. *ghurayb-dictionary
  • R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, B. K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody, 1980), section 1690adictionary
  • K.-M. Beyse and H.-J. Fabry, "arab," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 11dictionary
  • G. R. Driver, "Birds in the Old Testament," Palestine Exploration Quarterly 87 (1955): 5-20article
  • Richard Whitekettle, "Where the Wild Things Are: Primary Level Taxa in Israelite Zoological Thought," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 93 (2001): 17-37article
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1-16, Anchor Bible 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 661-63commentary
  • Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)monograph
  • David Marcus, "The Mission of the Raven (Gen. 8:7)," Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 29 (2002): 71-80article
  • R. W. L. Moberly, "Why Did Noah Send Out a Raven?" Vetus Testamentum 50 (2000): 345-56article
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1-15, Word Biblical Commentary 1 (Waco: Word, 1987), 185-86commentary
  • Mordechai Cogan, I Kings, Anchor Bible 10 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 425-27commentary
  • Marvin A. Sweeney, I and II Kings, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 210-12commentary
  • John Gray, I and II Kings, 3rd ed., Old Testament Library (London: SCM, 1977), 379-80commentary
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 38-42, Word Biblical Commentary 18B (Nashville: Nelson, 2011)commentary
  • Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Library (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), 545-46commentary
  • Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 60-150, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 555-57commentary
  • Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 3, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011), 620-27commentary
  • Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, Anchor Bible 18B (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 872-74commentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, Chapters 15-31, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005), 486-88commentary
  • Yehuda Feliks, The Animal World of the Bible (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1962)monograph
  • Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible 7C (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), 536commentary
  • J. Cheryl Exum, Song of Songs, Old Testament Library (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 205-6commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 1-39, Anchor Bible 19 (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 452-54commentary
  • Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 28-39, Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2002)commentary

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

All attested forms of עֹרֵב

m s absolute

עֹרֵב, כָּעוֹרֵב

Gen 8:7, Lev 11:15, Deu 14:14, Job 38:41, Psa 147:9, Isa 34:11, Sng 5:11

m p absolute

עֹרְבִים

1Ki 17:4, 1Ki 17:6

m p construct

עֹרְבֵי

Pro 30:17