To slaughter an animal (usually in sacrifice)
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Zābaḥ means to slaughter an animal for sacrifice, to offer a sacrificial meal, or to make an offering on an altar. The word is one of the Hebrew Bible's primary sacrificial terms, and its related noun zebaḥ (sacrifice, sacrificial feast) appears throughout the Pentateuch, Historical Books, Psalms, and Prophets.
Reader summary
Full entry for זָבַח (H2076) · Open the biblical lexicon
Zābaḥ means to slaughter an animal for sacrifice, to offer a sacrificial meal, or to make an offering on an altar. The word is one of the Hebrew Bible's primary sacrificial terms, and its related noun zebaḥ (sacrifice, sacrificial feast) appears throughout the Pentateuch, Historical Books, Psalms, and Prophets.
The BSB source-word alignment has 134 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include and sacrifice (8), sacrificed (8), to sacrifice (8), sacrifice (7), They sacrificed (7).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 31:54. Its strongest book concentrations include Exodus (18), 1 Kings (15), 1 Samuel (14), 2 Chronicles (14).
Zābaḥ means to slaughter an animal for sacrifice, to offer a sacrificial meal, or to make an offering on an altar. The word is one of the Hebrew Bible's primary sacrificial terms, and its related noun zebaḥ (sacrifice, sacrificial feast) appears throughout the Pentateuch, Historical Books, Psalms, and Prophets. Unlike the ʿōlāh (the burnt offering consumed entirely on the altar), the zebaḥ was a peace offering or fellowship offering that involved a shared meal: the fat and certain parts were burned for God, a portion went to the priests, and the remainder was eaten by the offerer and their household in the presence of the Lord.
Zābaḥ thus has an inherently communal and relational character — it is sacrifice as covenant meal, the act that seals and celebrates relationship between God and his people. The prophets use the word critically: when Israel offers zebaḥ while neglecting justice and the poor (Amos 5:22), God rejects the sacrifice. Samuel's rebuke of Saul — obedience is better than sacrifice (1 Sam.
15:22) — Targets the substitution of ritual for genuine covenant loyalty. The New Testament's use of sacrifice language (thusia from the related Greek concept, rather than direct translation of zābaḥ) builds on this entire tradition: Christ as the ultimate sacrifice, the church's bodily offering of lives in service (Rom. 12. 1), the sacrifice of praise.
The local Hebrew index currently counts about 134 H2076 uses, concentrated in the Pentateuch (Leviticus, Deuteronomy), the Historical Books (Judges, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings), and the Psalms, with important prophetic uses in Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. The word covers sanctioned sacrificial worship, idolatrous sacrifice (to other gods), and the prophetic critique of sacrifice divorced from covenant faithfulness.
But Samuel declared: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to His voice? Behold, obedience is better than sacrifice, and attentiveness is better than the fat of rams.
Samuel's rebuke of Saul uses a contrast that recurs throughout the prophets. The sacrificial vocabulary (zebaḥ, ʿōlāh) is set against hearing and obeying. The point is not that sacrifice is wrong but that sacrifice substituted for obedience is rejected. This verse becomes the canonical frame for all subsequent prophetic critiques of ritual.
Sacrifice a thank offering to God, and fulfill your vows to the Most High.
God calls for a zebaḥ of thanksgiving — the sacrifice of grateful acknowledgment rather than the mere performance of ritual. The psalm distinguishes between the form of sacrifice (which God does not need, vv.8-13) and the heart orientation it should express. Thanksgiving-sacrifice (tôdāh) is the sacrifice God desires.
Then tell them, 'It is the Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when He struck Egypt but spared our households.'
The Passover is called a zebaḥ to the Lord. The sacrificial meal establishes the pattern: the lamb's blood on the doorposts, the shared meal in the household, the ongoing annual remembrance. This is the sacrifice that shapes Israel's self-understanding as a redeemed people, and it provides the primary background for Jesus' last supper and Paul's 'Christ our Passover has been sacrificed' (1 Cor.5.7).
Even though you offer Me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them; for your peace offerings of fattened cattle I will have no regard.
Amos uses the full range of sacrifice vocabulary to describe God's rejection of Israel's worship while injustice continues. The zebaḥ peace offerings are specifically named. This is not a theological rejection of sacrifice itself but of sacrifice that has become disconnected from the covenant life it should express and seal.
The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.
After David's sin with Bathsheba, his penitential psalm uses the plural 'sacrifices' to identify what God actually requires: the broken spirit. This does not abolish sacrifice; it names the inner reality that gives sacrifice its meaning. A zebaḥ offered with an unbroken, impenitent heart is the empty form the prophets condemn.
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. Ritual slaughter that transforms animal death into covenant communion with God through prescribed cultic acts
Ritual slaughter that transforms animal death into covenant communion with God through prescribed cultic acts
to slaughter an animal (usually in sacrifice) BDB: slaughter for sacrifice Usage: kill, offer, (do) sacrifice, slay.
How the stem changes the meaning of this verb across the biblical text.
This verb appears through different tense, voice, mood, or stem patterns. Those forms help readers see how the action is presented in context.
זָבַח is a primitive root - no further derivation.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Zābaḥ confronts every generation of God's people with a question that does not resolve easily: what is the relationship between form and heart, between ritual and reality, between the act of offering and the life that the offering should express? The prophets who critique sacrifice are not rejecting the sacrificial system. They are insisting that the system exists to express and seal a covenant relationship that must be lived as well as offered.
Samuel's 'obedience is better than sacrifice' is not a statement that sacrifice is unnecessary. It is a statement that sacrifice without obedience is self-contradiction. The Passover zebaḥ is the canonical model: a sacrifice that is simultaneously remembrance, covenant renewal, communal meal, and declaration of identity. Israel eats together in the presence of the God who passed over them.
This is what sacrifice is for — not the production of divine favor through ritual performance but the enacted acknowledgment of what God has done and the renewed commitment to be his people. Every critique of empty religious ritual from Amos to Jesus reaches back into the zābaḥ tradition and its proper character. The Christian community that understands this will approach its own forms of worship with the same question: do these forms express and form genuine covenant loyalty, or have they become substitutes for it?
Paul's 'present your bodies as a living sacrifice' (Rom. 12. 1) is the New Covenant answer to zābaḥ: the whole life offered continuously, not the moment of ritual alone.
1Sam.15.22
Zābaḥ and its noun zebaḥ share a root with the word mizbēaḥ (altar, literally 'slaughter-place'). The verb describes the slaughter of an animal specifically for offering — distinguished from ordinary slaughter (šāḥaṭ) and from the entirely burned offering (ʿōlāh). The zebaḥ is characteristically a shared meal: God receives the fat and organs burned on the altar, priests receive their portion, and the offerer feasts with family and neighbors in the Lord's presence.
This communal dimension makes zābaḥ a fundamentally relational act, not merely a ritual transaction.
The trajectory from zābaḥ to the New Testament passes through the Passover, the prophetic critique of empty sacrifice, and the wisdom tradition's internalization of sacrifice (Ps. 51. 17: a broken spirit). Paul declares that Christ our Passover has been sacrificed (1 Cor. 5. 7) — the perfect zebaḥ that the Passover lambs all anticipated. The Letter to the Hebrews develops this most fully: Jesus is both the priest who offers and the sacrifice that is offered, and his once-for-all offering (Heb.
9. 26, 10. 12) Achieves what the repeated zābaḥ offerings could only shadow. The church's response is not continued animal sacrifice but the living sacrifice of dedicated lives (Rom. 12. 1) and the sacrifice of praise — the fruit of lips that acknowledge God's name (Heb. 13. 15). Zābaḥ is thus not abolished in the New Testament; it is fulfilled in Christ and transformed in the church's ongoing worship.
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