Hebrew word · H3963
לֶ֫תֶךְ
veletekh
lethek
A dry measure found only here in the Bible. Rabbinic tradition (followed by KJV and by Jerome's 'half a kor') takes it as half a homer. A related word, lth, appears as a measure in Ugaritic texts.
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
1) barley-measure
1a) uncertain measurement but thought to be half an homer-5 ephahs
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
A dry measure found only here in the Bible. Rabbinic tradition (followed by KJV and by Jerome's 'half a kor') takes it as half a homer. A related word, lth, appears as a measure in Ugaritic texts.
- Against the English
KJV says 'an half homer' and WEB and NASB 'a homer and a half', interpreting it. BSB, ESV and YLT transliterate it as 'lethech/letech', which avoids guessing but means nothing to readers.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Ugaritic lth; later Jewish tradition. The Septuagint replaces it with 'a nebel of wine', a different commodity, perhaps because the translators did not know the word.
Where it appears
Hosea · 1
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Hosea 3:2 וְלֵ֥תֶךְ and a lethech of
So I bought her for fifteen shekels of silver and a homer and a lethech of barley.
Here: 'And a lethech of'. This measure appears only here in the Bible. Jewish tradition and most translations take it as half a homer, and a related word appears for a dry measure in the Canaanite texts from Ugarit.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.