Hebrew word · H305
אַחֲלַי
'achalei
O that!
An exclamation of wish or longing: 'O that!', 'would that!', 'if only!'. It occurs only twice in the Hebrew Bible, here and in 2 Kings 5:3 (spelled ʾaḥălê).
Appears 2 times in 2 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
Oh that...!; oh would that!; ah that!
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
An exclamation of wish or longing: 'O that!', 'would that!', 'if only!'. It occurs only twice in the Hebrew Bible, here and in 2 Kings 5:3 (spelled ʾaḥălê).
- Against the English
English versions agree in substance ('O that', 'Oh, that'). The KJV/WEB/YLT 'O that' keeps the sigh well. NLT and others keep the wish too. No major version loses it.
- Used elsewhere in the period
In 2 Kings 5:3 the captive Israelite girl says to Naaman's wife, 'Would that my lord were with the prophet in Samaria! Then (ʾāz) he would cure him of his skin disease.' The sentence pattern is the same as Psalm 119:5–6: a wish, then 'then' (ʾāz) with the result ('Then I would not be ashamed', v. 6). Where the word comes from is uncertain. BDB and HALOT list proposals such as a link with the cry ʾāḥ ('ah!') plus the wish particle lû, or with the idiom ḥillâ pənê, 'to soften someone's face', meaning to entreat them. None is certain.
Where it appears
2 Kings · 1
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2 Kings 5:3 אַחֲלֵ֣י would that!
She said to her mistress, “If only my master would go to the prophet who is in Samaria, he would cure him of his leprosy.”
Psalms · 1
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Psalm 119:5 אַ֭חֲלַי would that!
Oh, that my ways were committed to keeping Your statutes!
Here: A sighing wish, 'if only!' It is a very rare word, found elsewhere only in 2 Kings 5:3. It opens the verse with longing, not with a statement, so the psalmist admits a gap between what God commanded (v. 4) and what his life actually is. It also supplies the letter aleph that this acrostic stanza needs.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.