Soil (from its general redness)
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H127 names soil or ground and can extend to cultivated land or a territory viewed as land. Genesis uses it for the ground from which the human is formed, the soil placed under toil after rebellion, and the ground that receives Abel's blood.
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Full entry for אֲדָמָה (H127) · Open the biblical lexicon
H127 names soil or ground and can extend to cultivated land or a territory viewed as land. Genesis uses it for the ground from which the human is formed, the soil placed under toil after rebellion, and the ground that receives Abel's blood.
The BSB source-word alignment has 225 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include the land (53), of the earth (28), the ground (23), land (9), of your land (9).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 1:25. Its strongest book concentrations include Genesis (43), Deuteronomy (37), Ezekiel (28), Jeremiah (18).
H127 names soil or ground and can extend to cultivated land or a territory viewed as land. Genesis uses it for the ground from which the human is formed, the soil placed under toil after rebellion, and the ground that receives Abel's blood. Proverbs uses the same concrete world to speak about patient agricultural work. The word keeps human life materially located: bodies depend on God's breath, food depends on land and labor, and violence leaves consequences in the places people inhabit.
H127 does not by itself identify the whole globe, define modern property rights, or explain every environmental hardship as a direct punishment. It helps teachers connect creation, mortality, work, land care, food, displacement, and justice while resisting romantic farming claims, victim-blaming, and the treatment of land or laborers as disposable.
H127 moves through creation, cultivation, covenant land, drought, bloodshed, exile, burial, and renewal. Its concrete sense must be read from each setting rather than turned into one undifferentiated symbol.
Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
The human is formed from dust taken from the ground, joining embodied dignity to creaturely dependence on God's gift of life.
And to Adam He said: “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat, cursed is the ground because of you; through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
After rebellion, the ground is cursed in relation to the human, and food now comes through painful toil rather than effortless abundance.
“What have you done?” replied the Lord. “The voice of your brother’s blood cries out to Me from the ground.
Abel's blood cries from the ground, making the land a witness to violence rather than a neutral backdrop to human wrongdoing.
The one who works his land will have plenty of food, but whoever chases fantasies lacks judgment.
Wisdom commends sustained work of one's land while contrasting it with chasing empty fantasies, without making harvest a universal measure of virtue.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. Soil as livelihood foundation: ranges from physical earth tilled by humans to covenantal promised land
Soil as livelihood foundation: ranges from physical earth tilled by humans to covenantal promised land
soil (from its general redness) BDB: ground Usage: country, earth, ground, husband(-man) (-ry), land.
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 4 selected witnesses from 225 lexical occurrence verses.
אֲדָמָה is built from this root:
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
H127 reminds the church that biblical faith is not disembodied. Humanity is formed from the ground and lives because God gives breath. Food requires soil, seasons, knowledge, labor, and shared social arrangements. Genesis also refuses to make the ground morally invisible: it bears the effects of rebellion and receives the blood of the murdered. This language supports grateful care for creation and serious attention to farm workers, food access, pollution, violence, and displacement, but it does not supply a shortcut from every drought or crop failure to a particular person's sin.
Proverbs honors steady cultivation without condemning people whose illness, disability, war, tenancy, or poverty limits their work. Faithful teaching therefore joins creaturely humility with practical stewardship, fair labor, truthful land use, generosity, and protection for those whose livelihood depends on damaged or insecure ground. The soil is God's gift and our material home, not an idol, an unlimited commodity, or a weapon for shaming the vulnerable.
Gen.2.7
H127 is a feminine Hebrew noun commonly rendered ground, soil, land, or country. Immediate syntax and geography determine whether the focus is loose earth, cultivated land, or a broader territory; it should not automatically be equated with every occurrence of other Hebrew words for earth or land.
The Old Testament uses H127 for the material ground of creation, farming, covenant life, judgment, exile, and renewal. The New Testament continues the creation-and-harvest world while locating final hope in resurrection and renewed creation, not in contempt for bodies or land.