StrongerBible

re'uven

רְאוּבֵן

HebrewH7205Proper Noun“Reuben”

Appears 72 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 29:32Gen 30:14Gen 35:22Gen 35:23Gen 37:21Gen 37:22Gen 37:29Gen 42:22Gen 42:37Gen 46:8Gen 46:9Gen 48:5
Compound of
ra'ahרָאָהto see: see1300H7200
benבֵּןson: child4943H1121
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradereh-oo-VENproper noun

What re'uven means

1

Reuben: Jacob's firstborn son by Leah, the brother who held the title of firstborn and lost everything that went with it

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

Leah names her first son in the same breath as she says the LORD has looked on her misery, and in Hebrew the name and her sentence ring together. Split another way, the name looks like the words for "see" and "son", which is where the old rendering "Behold, a son!" comes from. Scholars almost all treat both of these as play on the sound of the name rather than its real origin, and the standard lexicons say outright that the true derivation is unknown.

His story is a slow forfeit. He brings his mother the plants that restart the two sisters' bargaining over children. He then sleeps with his father's concubine, which in that world was less a private sin than a move on his father's place. In the Joseph story he comes off better: he talks his brothers out of murder, plans to pull Joseph out of the pit later, and comes back to find him gone. Years afterward he throws the deed back at them, and offers his own two sons as security for Benjamin, a reckless promise nobody takes up.

Jacob's last words make the loss official. Reuben is named the firstborn, first in dignity and first in strength, and then told he will not hold first place, because he went up to his father's bed. Chronicles states the transfer plainly: the rights of the firstborn passed to Joseph's sons and the leadership to Judah (יְהוּדָה). Almost everything the Bible later says about the tribe of Reuben follows from that one reversal.

Nuances

1aJacob's firstborn son by Leah: the man of the Genesis story, who keeps his brothers from killing Joseph and forfeits his standing as the eldest
Gen 29:32Gen 30:14Gen 35:22Gen 35:23Gen 37:21Gen 37:22Gen 37:29Gen 42:22Gen 42:37Gen 46:8Gen 48:5Gen 49:3
1bReuben at the head of his own family line: the ancestor a genealogy names before listing the four clans that came from him
TranslatabilityDirect
Gen 46:9Exo 6:14Num 26:51Ch 5:3
2

Reuben: the tribe descended from Jacob's firstborn, and the tableland east of the Jordan that the tribe held

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

On paper Reuben is Israel's senior tribe. In practice it is one of the smaller ones, and the Bible keeps having to account for the gap. Reuben is counted at 46,500 fighting men in the first wilderness list and 43,730 in the second, camps and marches on the south side under its own banner, sends a leader and a scout like every other tribe, and supplies the two ringleaders of the revolt against Moses.

Its real home is the high pastureland east of the Jordan. Reuben and Gad (גָּד) ask Moses for that country instead of crossing into Canaan, and are granted it on condition that they fight for their brothers first. From then on the two names travel together:

  • they cross the river armed, as they had promised
  • they rebuild and rename the towns around Heshbon
  • they raise an altar by the Jordan that nearly starts a civil war, until they explain it is a witness and not a rival place of worship

After that Reuben fades quickly. The old victory song in Judges scolds it for staying home among the sheepfolds while other tribes fought. Moses' blessing asks only that Reuben live and not die, which sounds less like a blessing than a worry, and the verse is hard enough that translators disagree over whether the second half hopes for many men or few. When a Moabite king later boasts on stone of taking that same tableland, he names Gad and never Reuben. Scholars disagree sharply about what all this adds up to, and the argument is set out below.

The name outlasts the tribe. Long after the eastern tribes were carried off by Assyria, Reuben still receives a strip of land in Ezekiel's vision of a restored country and a gate in its ideal city, and it heads the list of sealed tribes in Revelation. By then the word marks a fixed place in a sacred set of twelve rather than a people anyone could point to.

Nuances

2athe tribe of Reuben as one of Israel's twelve: counted in the census, camped and marching under its own banner, blessed or scolded as a tribe, and named as the line a person belongs to
Num 1:5Num 1:20Num 1:21Num 2:10Num 2:16Num 7:30Num 10:18Num 13:4Num 16:1Deu 11:6Deu 27:13Deu 33:6
2bReuben as a landholder east of the Jordan: the tribe that asked for the tableland, built its towns, received its borders and cities, and had to answer for the altar it raised there
Num 32:1Num 32:2Num 32:6Num 32:25Num 32:29Num 32:31Num 32:33Num 32:37Jos 4:12Jos 13:15Jos 13:23Jos 18:7
2cReuben as a name in an ideal twelve-part plan: a share of land and a city gate in Ezekiel's vision of a restored country, long after the tribe itself had gone
TranslatabilityDirect
Ezk 48:6Ezk 48:7Ezk 48:31

Disputed

Whether Reuben was once a genuinely dominant Israelite tribe in Transjordan that collapsed early, or whether the tribe's territory and primacy are largely a later literary construction.

  • contestedReuben's fixed place as firstborn in the genealogies preserves the memory of a tribe that really was dominant in the earliest phase of Israel and then disappeared, perhaps in the eleventh century; the supporting evidence is the Transjordanian sanctuary traditions, the "divisions of Reuben" addressed in Judges 5:15, and the anxious petition of Deuteronomy 33:6 that Reuben not die out.; Frank Moore Cross, "Reuben, First-Born of Jacob", Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100, Supplement (1988): 46-65; Frank Moore Cross, "Reuben, the Firstborn of Jacob: Sacral Traditions and Early Israelite History", in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 53-70
  • contestedNo early dominant Reuben can be recovered; the tribe's neat borders correspond to the boundaries an Assyrian administration later assigned to the same tableland, which suggests biblical writers projected a known later geography back onto the premonarchic period, and this explains why the Mesha Stele names Gad on that land but never Reuben.; Nadav Na'aman, on the correspondence between the Assyrian-assigned borders of the Mishor and the biblical territory of Reuben; Israel Finkelstein, Nadav Na'aman, and Thomas Römer, studies on the Mesha Stele and Transjordanian tribal geography; Niels Peter Lemche, on the recoverability of premonarchic Israelite tribal history
  • contestedThe tribal traditions are best read cautiously, as retrospective schematizations of Israel's early organization, without either reconstructing a great early Reuben or dismissing the traditions as invention.; Martin Noth, The History of Israel, on the tribal system and its traditions; Roland de Vaux, The Early History of Israel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978)

What scholars say about re'uven

The lexica converge on the judgment that the derivation of רְאוּבֵן is unresolved. Gesenius (Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae, 1247b) supplied the gloss "behold ye, a son!", parsing the form as the plural imperative רְאוּ plus בֵן, and BDB reproduces that gloss while registering with a pointed editorial "(!)" that Genesis 29:32 instead ties the name to רָאָה יְהוָה בְּעָנְיִי; HALOT and DCH likewise catalogue the name without adjudicating its origin. The traditional parsing is awkward, since an imperative plus an indefinite noun is not a normal Hebrew name pattern, and it does not match the text's own explanation. The older summary tradition is blunt: Hastings, s.v. "Reuben", concludes that numerous theories have been advanced "but no conclusion that can be accepted has been reached." Genesis commentators from Gunkel through Skinner, Westermann, Wenham, Sarna, Hamilton, and Alter treat 29:32 as paronomasia within the patterned sequence of Leah and Rachel birth namings in Genesis 29:31 to 30:24; Sarna observes that Leah's first two sons replicate a pair of verbs of divine attention, רָאָה for Reuben and שָׁמַע for Simeon. Three alternative lines of analysis are live. First, the versional evidence: Josephus consistently writes Ῥούβηλος and glosses it as ἔλεον τοῦ θεοῦ, and the Peshitta form is reported as Rabil or Rubil, so several witnesses end the name in lamed rather than nun; because the two letters are readily confused in Paleo-Hebrew script, some have posited an original theophoric Reʾûbēl with בֵן a secondary Hebraization, though the specific reconstructions of Redslob ("flock of Bel") and of Cheyne (a corruption of Jerahmeel) are rejected as arbitrary. Second, Noth's onomastic framework (Die israelitischen Personennamen, 1928), as systematized by Rechenmacher (Althebräische Personennamen, 2012), classes the name as profane rather than theophoric and prefers either a replacement name (Ersatzname) from a root rʾb meaning to repair or set right, or a greeting name. Third, comparative Semitic proposals: BDB following Dillmann connects an Arabic word for "lion", Sarna notes South Arabic raʾban "a chief" as fitting for a firstborn, and Cheyne and Black adduce a Minaean tribal name r-b-n that would make Reuben a clan designation rather than a personal name. No epigraphic attestation of the personal name is secure, whether in the Amarna corpus or the Egyptian topographical lists. On the tribal side, Gevirtz analysed the poetics of the deathbed reprimand of Genesis 49:3-4, where the disputed פַּחַז is read traditionally as "unstable" but by many as "reckless, wanton", which better suits the sexual offense; Cross argued from Reuben's fixed genealogical primacy, the "divisions of Reuben" in Judges 5:15, the Transjordanian sanctuary traditions, and the petition of Deuteronomy 33:6 that Reuben was genuinely dominant early and collapsed by the eleventh century, while Na'aman and Finkelstein read the tribal geography as a later construction keyed to Assyrian provincial boundaries and note that the Mesha Stele names the men of Gad at Ataroth but never Reuben. The Chronicler alone states the transfer of the birthright explicitly (1 Chronicles 5:1-2). In later reception the Testament of Reuben and Jubilees 33 expand Genesis 35:22 into an exemplum against lust, studied by Kugel and by Shinan and Zakovitch, while rabbinic tradition rehabilitates Reuben as the first penitent.

Where scholars disagree about re'uven

Where the name רְאוּבֵן actually comes from. Neither the traditional parsing "behold, a son!" nor the explanation Genesis 29:32 supplies is generally accepted as the real derivation, and no alternative has carried the field.

  • majorityThe name has no secure derivation. The traditional gloss "behold, a son!" does not fit normal Hebrew name formation, and Genesis 29:32 is deliberate sound play on the verb for seeing rather than an etymology, so the honest lexicographical position is that the origin is unknown.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), s.v. רְאוּבֵן, flagging the mismatch with Genesis 29:32; James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. "Reuben"; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), at Genesis 29:32
  • minorityThe form divides into the plural imperative of the verb for seeing plus the noun for a son, giving "behold ye, a son!", a greeting or presentation name of a type attested in West Semitic naming.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae (1829-1858), 1247b; Hans Rechenmacher, Althebräische Personennamen (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012)
  • minorityThe name was originally theophoric, ending in the divine element for God rather than in the word for son. Josephus writes it with a final l and glosses it as the pity of God, and the Syriac agrees, so the biblical ending may be a secondary substitution for an original divine name element.; Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae i.19.8, glossing the name as the pity of God; T. K. Cheyne and J. S. Black, eds., Encyclopaedia Biblica (London, 1899-1903), vol. IV, cols. 4091-4094
  • minorityThe name is a secular rather than a religious one: a replacement name from a root meaning to repair or set right, given to a child who makes good an earlier loss.; Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928); Hans Rechenmacher, Althebräische Personennamen (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012)
  • minorityThe name is comparative in origin, connected either to an Arabic word for a lion or to a South Arabian word for a chief, a fitting sense for a firstborn.; BDB, s.v. רְאוּבֵן, following August Dillmann, Die Genesis; Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary, 1989), at Genesis 29:32
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, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), s.v. רְאוּבֵןlexicon
  • HALOT, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. רְאוּבֵןlexicon
  • DCH, The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, ed. David J. A. Clines, s.v. רְאוּבֵןlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Thesaurus philologicus criticus linguae Hebraeae (1829-1858), 1247blexicon
  • Martin Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung (BWANT III/10; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928)monograph
  • Hans Rechenmacher, Althebräische Personennamen (Lehrbücher orientalischer Sprachen II/1; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012)monograph
  • Frank Moore Cross, "Reuben, First-Born of Jacob", Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 100, Supplement (1988): 46-65article
  • Frank Moore Cross, "Reuben, the Firstborn of Jacob: Sacral Traditions and Early Israelite History", in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 53-70monograph
  • Stanley Gevirtz, "The Reprimand of Reuben", Journal of Near Eastern Studies 30, no. 2 (1971): 87-98article
  • Nahum M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), at Genesis 29:32commentary
  • Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50 (Word Biblical Commentary 2; Dallas: Word Books, 1994)commentary
  • Claus Westermann, Genesis 12-36: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1985)commentary
  • John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1910)commentary
  • Hermann Gunkel, Genesis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1901)commentary
  • Victor P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis, Chapters 18-50 (New International Commentary on the Old Testament; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995)commentary
  • T. K. Cheyne and J. S. Black, eds., Encyclopaedia Biblica (London, 1899-1903), vol. IV, cols. 4091-4094reference-work
  • James Hastings, ed., A Dictionary of the Bible, s.v. "Reuben"reference-work
  • James L. Kugel, "Reuben's Sin with Bilhah in the Testament of Reuben"article
  • Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch, The Story of Reuben and Bilhah (Hebrew)monograph
  • Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae i.19.8; ii.3.1primary-source
  • Mesha Inscription (Moabite Stone), Louvre AO 5066, lines 10-11primary-source

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

All attested forms of רְאוּבֵן

m

רְאוּבֵן

Gen 29:32, Gen 30:14, Gen 35:22, Gen 35:23, Gen 37:21, Gen 37:22, Gen 37:29, Gen 42:22