Dimʿâ names tears in the selected prayer, oppression and restoration passages. Second Kings 20:5 records the Lord saying that He has seen Hezekiah's tears and heard his prayer, with a particular healing promise following.
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Full entry for דִּמְעָה (H1832) · Open the biblical lexicon
Dimʿâ names tears in the selected prayer, oppression and restoration passages. Second Kings 20:5 records the LORD saying that He has seen Hezekiah's tears and heard his prayer, with a particular healing promise following.
The BSB source-word alignment has 23 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include with tears (6), from tears (2), My tears (2), of tears (2), the tears (2).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at 2 Kings 20:5. Its strongest book concentrations include Psalms (8), Jeremiah (5), Isaiah (3), Lamentations (3).
Dimʿâ names tears in the selected prayer, oppression and restoration passages. Second Kings 20:5 records the Lord saying that He has seen Hezekiah's tears and heard his prayer, with a particular healing promise following. Ecclesiastes 4:1 instead observes the tears of oppressed people who have no comforter while power remains with their oppressors. The bodily expression belongs to different circumstances and cannot by itself establish a common cause or outcome.
Psalm 56:8 asks that tears be kept in God's bottle and book, using a vivid appeal for the speaker's distress not to be forgotten. Isaiah 25:8 promises their removal when death is swallowed up. Those passages give room for remembered sorrow and future hope without claiming that tears must immediately cease. Teaching should recognize the sufferer and the passage's stated response rather than treat crying as an automatic proof of repentance, a failure of faith or a technique that obliges God to reproduce Hezekiah's experience.
Hezekiah's answered prayer, uncomforted oppressed people, remembered tears and promised final removal show different settings. The noun identifies weeping while the account supplies its cause, moral circumstances and stated response rather than one universal formula.
“Go back and tell Hezekiah the leader of My people that this is what the Lord, the God of your father David, says: ‘I have heard your prayer; I have seen your tears. I will surely heal you. On the third day from now you will go up to the house of the Lord.
The Lord sees the king's tears and announces a particular healing after his prayer. The promised third-day recovery belongs to this account, not to crying as a universal mechanism.
Again I looked, and I considered all the oppression taking place under the sun. I saw the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter; the power lay in the hands of their oppressors, and there was no comforter.
The tears belong to oppressed people whose oppressors hold power and who lack a comforter. The observation calls attention to injustice rather than defective emotional control in its victims.
You have taken account of my wanderings. Put my tears in Your bottle—are they not in Your book?
The petition's bottle and book images ask that distress be remembered. They should be explained as the psalm's vivid prayer rather than a physical description of heavenly storage.
He will swallow up death forever. The Lord God will wipe away the tears from every face and remove the disgrace of His people from the whole earth. For the Lord has spoken.
Tears are wiped away within the Lord's swallowing up death and removing disgrace. The promise's large restoration setting cannot become an immediate demand that every present mourner stop crying.
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. weeping
weeping BDB: tears Usage: tears.
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 1 selected witness from 23 lexical occurrence verses.
דִּמְעָה is built from this root:
Removal of tears signals comprehensive restoration.Isaiah 25:6-12
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Ecclesiastes places tears beside unequal power and the repeated absence of a comforter. Reducing the verse to advice about managing emotion would hide the injustice its speaker observes. Second Kings gives another response: Hezekiah's tears are seen and his prayer answered within a particular royal account. The contrast requires teachers to notice circumstances before borrowing an outcome for someone else.
Psalm 56 asks that sorrow be remembered through bottle and book imagery, and Isaiah anticipates tears removed with death itself. Revelation 21:1-4 gives a Christian vision of that removal within God's dwelling with His people. Future hope should deepen compassionate attention rather than become a reason to resent tears in the present. The noun neither measures a person's faith nor establishes that more visible weeping compels more favorable answers. It names an expression whose meaning remains accountable to the story, prayer or promise in which it appears.
Eccl.4.1
Tears names the expression of weeping, not a single motive or guaranteed result. Prayer, oppression and future restoration supply different functions; Psalm 56's bottle language belongs to poetic petition rather than an extra material sense of the noun.
Revelation 21:1-4 presents God wiping away tears in the renewed dwelling with His people, alongside the end of death and mourning. John 11 also records Jesus' tears among the bereaved. These witnesses allow future hope and present compassion without requiring current tears to prove unbelief.