qorah

קוֹרָה

HebrewH6982“beam, roof”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 19:82Ki 6:22Ki 6:52Ch 3:7Sng 1:17

Root family

qurקוּרto dig6H6979

Word studyResearch-gradeko-RAWnoun

What qorah means

a roof beam: the heavy horizontal timber laid across the walls of a building to carry its roof or ceiling, and by extension the roof itself

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

A house in ancient Israel was roofed by laying heavy timbers across the tops of its walls and its inner pillars, then covering them with lighter poles, brush, and packed mud. This word names those load-bearing timbers. It is the single piece of wood that makes a shelter possible, and that is why one plain word can serve at both ends of the social scale.

The five places it appears run from the humble to the splendid:

a group of poor prophets go down to the Jordan so that each can cut one for a new dwelling (2 Kings 6:2 and 6:5)
Solomon's builders overlay the temple's with gold along with its doorways and walls (2 Chronicles 3:7)
two lovers lie under cedar branches and call them the beams of their house (Song of Songs 1:17)

The wood itself differs enormously, from common local oak or pine to cedar shipped in at great cost from Lebanon, but the word does not change with it. It always names the timber that spans an opening and holds up whatever is above.

Because the beam is what a roof rests on, naming it can stand for the whole roof. When Lot begs the mob outside his door to leave his two guests alone, he pleads that they have come under the shadow of his beam, meaning under his roof and therefore under his protection. Ancient readers heard it that way too: the early Greek translators simply used their ordinary word for a roof or shelter (στέγη).

Hebrew also has a verb built from this noun (קָרָה), meaning to lay beams on a building or roof it over. Its most memorable use lifts a carpenter's ordinary work into poetry: in Psalm 104 God lays the beams of his upper rooms on the waters, framing the sky the way a builder frames an upstairs room.

Nuances

1athe timber itself: a length of construction wood laid across walls or pillars to carry a ceiling or roof

TranslatabilityDirect

2Ki 6:22Ki 6:52Ch 3:7Sng 1:17

1bthe beam standing for the whole roof, and so for the house and the shelter it gives

Gen 19:8

What qorah does not mean

Three traps are easy to fall into with this word.

Older reference tools, including Strong's concordance itself, trace the word to a root meaning to dig or cut a trench and gloss it as a rafter that forms trenches. No modern lexicon follows that, and nothing about digging belongs in the word; it simply names a beam.
The English word "beam" has drifted a long way from timber into a beam of light, a beaming smile, and a balance beam. None of that is in the Hebrew, which never means anything but a piece of building wood.
The famous saying about the beam in your own eye does not come from this word. That saying is in the Greek New Testament and uses a Greek word for a plank (δοκός); the Hebrew word is never used in a picture like it.

One more thing is worth knowing rather than avoiding. In Genesis 19:8 the beam stands for the roof, and Lot appeals to it to justify handing over his daughters. Readers sometimes take his appeal as the narrator's approval of what he offers. The word itself carries only the ordinary claim that a guest under one's roof is protected; it says nothing about whether Lot's proposal was right.

What scholars say about qorah

The standard lexica are unanimous on the core sense. BDB glosses the noun "rafter, beam," reading the suffixed form in Genesis 19:8 as "my roof-tree"; HALOT gives the same core gloss with fuller comparative material, and DCH, which excludes etymology by design, catalogues the syntactic partners (beams of cedar, beams overlaid with gold). Lexicographers separate two verbs written קרה: the common one meaning "to meet, befall," and a second meaning "to lay beams, to roof over," which BDB treats as coined from this noun (Nehemiah 2:8; 3:3; 3:6; 2 Chronicles 34:11; and figuratively of God in Psalm 104:3). The concrete noun is therefore taken as primary. Comparative evidence is thinner than popular sources report: the secure cognate is Jewish Aramaic קוֹרְתָא "crossbeam" (Jastrow; Sokoloff), which became the technical term for the alley crossbeam of an eruv in Mishnah Eruvin 1:3; the ordinary Akkadian beam-word gušūru is unrelated, and the occasionally adduced qarītu "granary" belongs semantically to the qiryah "town" group rather than to "beam"; DULAT records Ugaritic qry "meet," qrʾ "call," qrb "draw near," and qrt "city," none meaning "roof" or "beam." The versions confirm the sense: the Septuagint renders Song 1:17 with δοκός and the Genesis idiom with στέγη. Strong's derivation from קוּר "to dig" is a folk etymology and is not followed. Commentators read the individual verses along these lines: Cogan and Tadmor note the plain domestic setting and the poverty of the prophetic community in 2 Kings 6; Keel and Exum read Song 1:17 as an outdoor bower imagined as a cedar palace; the Chronicler's gilded beams heighten the older account in 1 Kings 6. Iron Age roofing studies (Shiloh; Stager; Bunimovitz and Faust) describe exactly the construction the word presumes, and Liphschitz's dendroarchaeology accounts for the gap between common local timber and imported Cedar of Lebanon.

Where scholars disagree about qorah

Whether the noun is attested only five times in the received Hebrew text, or twice more in 1 Kings on a proposed emendation.

majorityThe Masoretic text stands at 1 Kings 6:15 and 7:7, so the noun has five secure occurrences (Genesis 19:8; 2 Kings 6:2, 6:5; Song of Songs 1:17; 2 Chronicles 3:7). This is the count current lexica work with.; Koehler & Baumgartner, HALOT, s.v. קוֹרָה; D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), s.v. קוֹרָה
minority1 Kings 6:15 and 7:7 should be emended to plural forms of this noun, in place of the Masoretic "walls" and "floor," following the Septuagint; that would add two occurrences, both in Solomon's building account.; Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. קוֹרָה

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

Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. קוֹרָהlexicon
Koehler & Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), s.v. קוֹרָהlexicon
D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), s.v. קוֹרָהlexicon
M. Cogan & H. Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible 11 (Doubleday, 1988), on 2 Kings 6:1-7commentary
O. Keel, The Song of Songs, Continental Commentary (Fortress, 1994), on Song 1:16-17commentary
J. C. Exum, Song of Songs, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 2005), on Song 1:16-17commentary
G. del Olmo Lete & J. Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, 3rd ed. (Brill, 2015)lexicon
M. Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, s.v. קוֹרָהlexicon
M. Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period (Bar Ilan University Press)lexicon
S. Bunimovitz & A. Faust, "The Four Room House: Embodying Iron Age Israelite Society," Near Eastern Archaeology 66:1-2 (2003): 22-31article
Y. Shiloh, "The Four-Room House," Israel Exploration Journal 20 (1970): 180-190article
L. E. Stager, "The Archaeology of the Family in Ancient Israel," BASOR 260 (1985): 1-35article
N. Liphschitz, Timber in Ancient Israel: Dendroarchaeology and Dendrochronology, Institute of Archaeology Monograph Series 26 (Tel Aviv University, 2007)monograph
N. Liphschitz & G. Biger, "Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) in Israel in Antiquity," Israel Exploration Journal 41 (1991): 167-175article

qorah

What qorah means

a roof beam: the heavy horizontal timber laid across the walls of a building to carry its roof or ceiling, and by extension the roof itself

Nuances

What scholars say about qorah

Where scholars disagree about qorah

Sources

All attested forms of קוֹרָה

f s absolute

f p absolute

f p construct

f s construct

What qorah means

a roof beam: the heavy horizontal timber laid across the walls of a building to carry its roof or ceiling, and by extension the roof itself

Nuances

Related words

The English words used to translate qorah

How qorah differs from similar Hebrew words

qorah in the other biblical languages

What scholars say about qorah

Where scholars disagree about qorah

Sources

All attested forms of קוֹרָה

f s absolute

f p absolute

f p construct

f s construct