Hebrew word · H8452

תּוֹרָה

torat

custom

From the verb yarah, "to point, direct, teach." Its core sense is direction or instruction: a parent's teaching (Proverbs 1:8), a priest's ruling (Haggai 2:11), a prophet's message (Isaiah 1:10), God's instruction to Israel.

Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

custom, manner, mode, law (of man)

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

From the study of 2 Samuel 7:19

Range of meaning

From the verb yarah, "to point, direct, teach." Its core sense is direction or instruction: a parent's teaching (Proverbs 1:8), a priest's ruling (Haggai 2:11), a prophet's message (Isaiah 1:10), God's instruction to Israel. Over time it came to mean the body of covenant instruction, and later the five books of Moses. A sense of "way of acting, custom, procedure" is proposed mainly for this verse.

Against the English

KJV "manner," BSB "custom," NASB "custom" take it as a usual way of acting. ESV "instruction" keeps the core sense. NIV "decree" treats it as a binding pronouncement. YLT "law" is the most literal-sounding, but modern readers hear legal statute in it.

How it drifted

English "law" (via the Septuagint's nomos and the Vulgate's lex) narrowed torah toward legislation. Strong's separate number for this verse ("custom") goes the opposite way: it fixes one interpretation as if the word itself meant something different here.

Used elsewhere in the period

Septuagint: ho nomos tou anthrōpou, "the law of the man." Vulgate: lex Adam, "the law of Adam." The parallel in 1 Chronicles 17:17 reads instead kᵉtor ha'adam hamaʿalah, probably "according to the rank of a man of high degree." The rare word tor ("turn, row, order") is close in spelling to torat, which suggests the two texts are related. No other biblical text has the exact phrase torat ha'adam.

Where it appears

2 Samuel · 1

  1. 2 Samuel 7:19 תּוֹרַ֥ת [is] [the] manner of

    And as if this was a small thing in Your eyes, O Lord GOD, You have also spoken about the future of the house of Your servant. Is this Your custom with man, O Lord GOD?

    Here: "The torah of." The usual sense is teaching or instruction. Here it is read in several ways: "custom/manner" (KJV, BSB), "instruction/charter" (ESV), or "decree" (NIV). Strong's gives this one occurrence its own number, H8452, "custom." That choice already assumes one reading. Most lexicons treat it as the ordinary word torah.

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.