Hebrew word · H1565

גַּלְמוּד

galmud

solitary

A rare word, used only four times: Job 3:7 ('let that night be barren'), Job 15:34, Job 30:3 ('gaunt' with want and hunger), and Isa 49:21, where Zion says 'I was bereaved and barren'. The core idea is sterile, desolate, without life or offspring.

Appears 4 times in 4 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

1) hard, barren, harsh, bleak

1a) harsh, bleak (of a company of wicked men)

1b) barren (of women)

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

In depth

From the study of Job 15:34

Range of meaning

A rare word, used only four times: Job 3:7 ('let that night be barren'), Job 15:34, Job 30:3 ('gaunt' with want and hunger), and Isa 49:21, where Zion says 'I was bereaved and barren'. The core idea is sterile, desolate, without life or offspring. Lexicons such as BDB connect it with an Arabic word for hard rock. The picture is stone-hard ground where nothing grows.

Against the English

'Barren' (BSB, WEB, ESV, NIV, NASB) captures the main sense. The KJV's 'desolate' keeps the emptiness but loses the idea of having no children. YLT's 'gloomy' misses the point. In modern English 'barren' can sound purely agricultural, but the Isaiah parallel shows it covers childlessness as well.

Used elsewhere in the period

Isa 49:21 puts galmûdâ alongside 'bereaved' to describe a mother left without children, the closest parallel. In Job 3:7 Job curses the night of his conception: let it be galmûd, with no joyful birth-cry in it.

Where it appears

Job · 3

  1. Job 3:7 גַלְמ֑וּד barren

    Behold, may that night be barren; may no joyful voice come into it.

  2. Job 15:34 גַּלְמ֑וּד [is] barren

    For the company of the godless will be barren, and fire will consume the tents of bribery.

    Here: Hard and lifeless like rock, producing nothing. Here it means a household with no offspring and no future. It stands in a sentence with no verb ('[is] barren'), so it states a fixed condition.

  3. Job 30:3 גַּ֫לְמ֥וּד barren

    Gaunt from poverty and hunger, they gnawed the dry land, and the desolate wasteland by night.

Isaiah · 1

  1. Isaiah 49:21 וְגַלְמוּדָ֑ה and barren

    Then you will say in your heart, ‘Who has begotten these for me? I was bereaved and barren; I was exiled and rejected. So who has reared them? Look, I was left all alone, so where did they come from?’”

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.