Hebrew word · H7632
שָׁבִיב
sheviv
flame
Flame, a flickering tongue of fire. This is its only use in biblical Hebrew.
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
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
Flame, a flickering tongue of fire. This is its only use in biblical Hebrew.
- Against the English
KJV, WEB and YLT say "spark". BSB, ESV and NASB say "flame". "Spark" suggests a tiny leftover ember. The related Aramaic word points to a living flame.
- How it drifted
The "spark" rendering goes back to early translators guessing at a rare word. The evidence from related languages favours "flame".
- Used elsewhere in the period
In biblical Aramaic, šəbîb means the furnace flame that kills the guards in Daniel 3:22. Its plural describes God's throne as "flames of fire" in Daniel 7:9. Later Aramaic and Syriac use related words for "flame". In 2 Samuel 14:7 the woman of Tekoa describes the killing of her last son as quenching "my coal that is left", the same idea of a hearth fire standing for a family line.
Where it appears
Job · 1
-
Job 18:5 שְׁבִ֣יב [the] flame of
Indeed, the lamp of the wicked is extinguished; the flame of his fire does not glow.
Here: The flame or flickering tongue of a fire. This is the only place it occurs in biblical Hebrew. Its Aramaic relative means "flame" in Daniel 3:22 and 7:9, which supports "flame" over KJV's "spark".
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.