the Week of Proper 26 / Ordinary 31
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Bible Dictionaries
Woman
Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words
or 'Ishshâh (אִשָּׁה, Strong's #802), “woman; wife; betrothed one; bride; each.” This word has cognates in Akkadian, Ugaritic, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ethiopic. It appears about 781 times in biblical Hebrew and in all periods of the language.
This noun connotes one who is a female human being regardless of her age or virginity. Therefore, it appears in correlation to “man” (ish): “… She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Gen. 2:23). This is its meaning in its first biblical usage: “And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man [‘adam], made he a woman, and brought her unto the man” (Gen. 2:22). The stress here is on identification of womanhood rather than a family role.
The stress on the family role of a “wife” appears in passages such as Gen. 8:16: “Go forth of the ark, thou, and thy wife, and thy sons, and thy sons’ wives with thee.”
In one special nuance the word connotes “wife” in the sense of a woman who is under a man’s authority and protection; the emphasis is on the family relationship considered as a legal and social entity: “And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his brother’s son, and all their substance that they had gathered …” (Gen. 12:5).
In Lam. 2:20 'ishshâh is a synonym for “mother”: “Shall the women eat their [offspring, the little ones who were born healthy]?” In Gen. 29:21 (cf. Deut. 22:24) it appears to connote “bride” or “betrothed one”: “And Jacob said unto Laban, Give me my wife, for my days are fulfilled, that I may go in unto her.” Eccl. 7:26 uses the word generically of “woman” conceived in general, or womanhood: “And I find more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets …” (cf. Gen. 31:35).
This word is used only infrequently of animals: “Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female” (Gen. 7:2).
This word can also be used figuratively describing foreign warriors and/or heroes as “women,” in other words as weak, unmanly, and cowardly: “In that day shall Egypt be like unto women: and it shall be afraid and fear because of the shaking of the hand of the Lord of hosts …” (Isa. 19:16).
In a few passages 'ishshâh means “each” or “every”: “But every woman shall borrow of her neighbor, and of her that sojourneth in her house …” (Exod. 3:22; cf. Amos 4:3). A special use of this nuance ouurs in passages such as Jer. 9:20, where in conjunction with re’ut (“neighbor”) it means “one” (female): “Yet hear the word of the Lord, O ye women, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth, and teach your daughters wailing, and every one her neighbor lamentation.”
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Vines, W. E., M. A. Entry for 'Woman'. Vine's Expository Dictionary of OT Words. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/vot/w/woman.html. 1940.
