Hebrew word · H2243
חֹב
bechubi
breast
Bosom, the fold of a garment over the chest. Found only here in the Hebrew Bible. Its meaning comes from related languages: Aramaic and Syriac ḥubbā, 'bosom'.
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
bosom
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
- Range of meaning
Bosom, the fold of a garment over the chest. Found only here in the Hebrew Bible. Its meaning comes from related languages: Aramaic and Syriac ḥubbā, 'bosom'.
- Against the English
KJV and YLT put 'bosom', which is literal. BSB, WEB, NIV and ESV put 'heart', which makes it inward and emotional and loses the picture of a physical hiding place.
- How it drifted
Modern translators turned the concrete 'bosom' into 'heart', so the verse now sounds like hiding feelings rather than stowing something away in one's clothing.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Hapax legomenon, meaning a word that occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible. HALOT and BDB both connect it with the Aramaic word for 'bosom'. The more common Hebrew word for bosom is חֵיק (e.g. Proverbs 6:27; 16:33).
Where it appears
Job · 1
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Job 31:33 בְּחֻבִּ֣י in bosom my
if I have covered my transgressions like Adam by hiding my guilt in my heart,
Here: 'In my bosom'. This word occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible. Related words in Aramaic and Syriac mean the bosom or the fold of a garment over the chest, where people carried things close and out of sight. The picture is concrete: guilt pocketed against one's chest.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.