Hebrew word · H7150
קְרִיאָה
hakeri'ah
proclamation
A proclamation, the thing called out. BDB and HALOT give essentially this one sense because the noun has only this one occurrence in the Hebrew Bible, so its meaning rests on its root and its setting here.
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
proclamation, preaching
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 proclamation, the thing called out. BDB and HALOT give essentially this one sense because the noun has only this one occurrence in the Hebrew Bible, so its meaning rests on its root and its setting here.
- Against the English
YLT's "proclaim... the proclamation" and KJV's "preach... the preaching" keep the repetition, which is more awkward but closer to the Hebrew. BSB, NIV and WEB use "message," which reads smoothly but loses the echo and sounds more generic.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Only here in the Hebrew Bible. The word's form is often taken as a mark of later Hebrew influenced by Aramaic, and the noun becomes common in later rabbinic Hebrew with the sense of "reading" or "recitation" (as in the keriat shema, the recitation of the Shema). The Septuagint renders it κήρυγμα, a herald's announcement. A single rare word cannot date a book by itself.
Where it appears
Jonah · 1
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Jonah 3:2 הַקְּרִיאָ֔ה the proclamation
“Get up! Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message that I give you.”
Here: Built from the same root as the verb, so the line sounds like "call out the call." This noun appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, and the sound link between verb and noun is lost in "proclaim the message."
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.