StrongerBible

tummah

תֻּמָּה

HebrewH8538“integrity, innocence, ...”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Job 2:3Job 2:9Job 27:5Job 31:6Pro 11:3
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradetoom-MAHnoun

What tummah means

integrity: an undivided honesty of character, and so innocence of the wrongdoing a person stands accused of

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

This is a rare word, appearing only five times, all of them in the wisdom books and four of them in Job. It belongs to a family of Hebrew words built on the idea of being whole or finished, and it sits firmly at the moral end of that idea: a person who is all of one piece, with no gap between what they are inside and what they do, and nothing kept hidden. It is the quality named by the word (תָּם) the book of Job uses when God himself calls Job blameless.

In Job the word is something a person grips and will not let go of. God says Job is still holding fast to it; his wife asks whether he is really still holding onto it; Job swears he will not surrender it as long as he breathes, and invites God to weigh him and see it for what it is. Inside the argument with his friends this comes very close to a courtroom claim. They insist his suffering proves a hidden sin, and Job refuses to sign that confession. His very next line sets this word beside his righteousness (צְדָקָה), which shows what he means: not that he has never sinned, but that he is not guilty of what they are alleging, and will not lie about himself to make their argument work.

In Proverbs the same word does quieter work. There the integrity of the upright (יָשָׁר) guides them, set against the crookedness that trips up the treacherous. Honest, single-hearted character is pictured almost as a guide walking ahead of a person on the road, while the double-dealer's own twistiness eventually brings him down. The proverb is less a moral scolding than an observation about how the two kinds of life actually end up.

The word is a close companion of the commoner term for integrity (תֹּם), which covers this same moral ground and stretches further besides. What is distinctive here is not a different meaning but where the word turns up: at the hinges of Job, naming the one thing that whole book puts on trial.

Nuances

1ainnocence held under attack: the blamelessness a sufferer refuses to give up, amounting to a claim of being not guilty of the wrongdoing alleged
Job 2:3Job 2:9Job 27:5Job 31:6
Job 27:5

Whether Job's integrity in this verse is primarily a forensic claim of innocence regarding the specific wrongdoing his friends allege, or primarily his refusal to falsify his own moral self-understanding by making a coerced confession.

  • majorityThe claim is forensic. Job speaks as a defendant refusing a guilty verdict, as shown by the pairing of this noun with tsedaqah in the following verse and by the oath of innocence in chapter 31.; David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, Word Biblical Commentary 18A; Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Library
  • minorityThe claim is moral and existential. Job clings to this quality because a false confession would falsify his own moral self-understanding, an emphasis the book already exploits in the ambiguity of 2:9.; Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations
1bhonest wholeness of character: the single-hearted uprightness that keeps a person on a safe path
Pro 11:3

What scholars say about tummah

BDB glosses this as a feminine noun "integrity" and marks the form "(late)"; Strong's and TWOT (2522b) give "innocence". HALOT and DCH gloss it around "integrity, innocence" with a cross-reference to the root tmm ("to be complete, finished"), and both list the same five attestations: Job 2:3, 2:9, 27:5, 31:6 and Proverbs 11:3. Kedar-Kopfstein's TDOT article on tamam treats the whole family (tom, tam, tamim, tummah) as a single semantic field running from quantitative completeness to moral blamelessness and does not isolate the feminine noun as a distinct concept; NIDOTTE and TLOT likewise subordinate it to the root article rather than treating it as a separate lemma. The difference from masculine tom is therefore morphological and distributional (a late feminine abstract clustering in Job) rather than lexical, with the collocation "hold fast / not remove" giving it in Job the flavor of a possession defended under attack. Comparative Semitic evidence (Arabic tamma "to be complete", plus Akkadian, Ugaritic, Syriac and Ethiopic reflexes) supports quantitative primacy for the root, with the ethical specialization a Hebrew development. The strongest evidence for the sense is internal parallelism: tummah alongside tsedaqah in Job 27:5-6, and tummat yesharim set against selef bogedim in Proverbs 11:3. Commentators on Job (Clines, Habel, Hartley, Longman, Alter, and the UBS Handbook) read the noun as innocence of the wrongdoing alleged rather than sinlessness, citing Job's own admissions at 13:26 and 14:16-17; Newsom emphasizes instead Job's refusal to falsify his moral self-understanding. On Proverbs 11:3, Fox and Waltke gloss it as honest, transparent single-heartedness, the antithesis of the crookedness (selef) and treachery of the second colon, with Waltke defining the paired bogedim as those unfaithful to an established relationship. The ancient versions read it morally throughout: LXX Job 27:5 has akakia, Jerome has innocentia at 27:5 (and innocentiam at 2:3, in simplicitate tua at 2:9) and simplicitas at Proverbs 11:3. LXX Proverbs 11:3 does not render the Hebrew line at all but substitutes a different, paraphrastic proverb, so Greek Proverbs supplies no evidence for the word there, and Greek Job is a progressively abbreviated witness. The literary-critical question about displaced material in Job 27 (Clines) does not affect the reading, since the noun remains on Job's lips on the major reconstructions.

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, s.v. תֻּמָּהlexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. תֻּמָּהlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. תֻּמָּהlexicon
  • TWOT 2522b, s.v. תָּמַםtheological dictionary
  • Benjamin Kedar-Kopfstein, "תָּמַם," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. 15theological dictionary
  • David J. A. Clines, Job 21-37, Word Biblical Commentary 18Acommentary
  • Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, Old Testament Librarycommentary
  • John E. Hartley, The Book of Job, New International Commentary on the Old Testamentcommentary
  • Carol A. Newsom, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginationsmonograph
  • Robert Alter, The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastestranslation and commentary
  • Michael V. Fox, Proverbs 10-31, Anchor Yale Biblecommentary
  • Bruce K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs, New International Commentary on the Old Testamentcommentary

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

All attested forms of תֻּמָּה

f s construct

תֻּמָּתִי

Job 27:5, Job 31:6

f s construct

תֻּמַּת

Pro 11:3

f s construct

תֻמָּתֶךָ

Job 2:9

f s construct

תֻמָּתוֹ

Job 2:3