Properly, to goad , i.e. (by implication) to teach (the rod being an Oriental incentive )
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Lāmad means to learn and in its causative form (Piel) to teach or train. The root sense involves the use of a goad — the pointed stick used to direct livestock — and carries an implicit image of directed, purposeful formation rather than passive information transfer.
Reader summary
Full entry for לָמַד (H3925) · Open the biblical lexicon
Lāmad means to learn and in its causative form (Piel) to teach or train. The root sense involves the use of a goad — the pointed stick used to direct livestock — and carries an implicit image of directed, purposeful formation rather than passive information transfer.
The BSB source-word alignment has 86 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include teach me (7), Learn (5), . . . (4), Teach (4), and teach (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Deuteronomy 4:1. Its strongest book concentrations include Psalms (27), Deuteronomy (17), Jeremiah (13), Isaiah (9).
This entry includes 2 verse guides that explain exact original-language forms in context.
Lāmad means to learn and in its causative form (Piel) to teach or train. The root sense involves the use of a goad — the pointed stick used to direct livestock — and carries an implicit image of directed, purposeful formation rather than passive information transfer. To teach with lāmad is to form, to guide, to direct someone's movement and understanding over time.
Deuteronomy uses the verb in the context of Israel's formation under the law: the words God has given are to be taught to children, rehearsed in daily life, inscribed on doorposts so that the next generation is formed by them, not merely informed. The Psalms use lāmad when the psalmist asks God to teach him his statutes, his ways, his paths. This is not academic instruction; it is the formation of the whole person in the direction of God's revealed will.
Isaiah's Servant Song (Isa. 50. 4) uses the word for the tongue of the taught — the one formed to know how to sustain the weary with a word. The prophets also use lāmad negatively: Israel has learned the ways of the nations, has been formed by wrong patterns rather than the word of God. Formation is continually happening; the question is what is forming.
Lāmad appears about 87 times in the local Hebrew index, with concentration in Deuteronomy, Psalms, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. In Deuteronomy it is the primary verb for the transmission of Torah to the next generation. In Psalms it is the vocabulary of the believer's ongoing formation by God's word. In the prophets it describes both faithful formation and the warning against being formed by wrong sources.
These are the commandments and statutes and ordinances that the Lord your God has instructed me to teach you to follow in the land that you are about to enter and possess,
The opening of the Shema context uses lāmad (Piel: to teach) for Moses' commission to transmit the Torah. The words follow in verses 4-9: hear O Israel, love the Lord, teach these to your children, talk of them when you sit and walk and lie down and rise. Teaching in this sense is total-life formation, not classroom instruction.
It was good for me to be afflicted, that I might learn Your statutes.
The psalmist testifies that affliction itself became the occasion of lāmad. Formation through suffering is not only possible; it is the normal pattern of the person who is being shaped by God's word. The verse refuses any account of spiritual formation that excludes difficulty as a means of learning.
The Lord God has given Me the tongue of discipleship, to sustain the weary with a word. He awakens Me morning by morning; He awakens My ear to listen as a disciple.
The Servant's speech uses lāmad twice: his tongue has been taught, and his ear hears as one who is being taught. This is the portrait of the ideal disciple-teacher: formed first as a listener, only then equipped to sustain others. The daily rhythm of being awakened to hear is the context of formation. Teachers and preachers should notice that the Servant's capacity to help others comes from his prior formation, not from his own natural ability.
Show me Your ways, O Lord; teach me Your paths.
The petition form: lāmad directed to God as teacher. The psalmist asks not for information about God's paths but to be formed in them. This is the theological assumption behind lāmad — that God himself is the teacher who shapes those who seek him, and that the learning involves walking (paths, ways) not only knowing.
This is what the Lord says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by the signs in the heavens, though the nations themselves are terrified by them.
Negative use: Israel is warned not to be formed (lāmad) by the nations' patterns of fear and idolatry. The verb assumes that formation is always occurring and that the source of formation determines the shape of the person. Being formed by the wrong patterns is as serious as direct disobedience.
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.
Verse-level guides showing how this original-language form works in its specific context, including grammar, verse function, and guarded interpretation.
Hebrew word. Teaching rooted in disciplinary correction; learning through habituation and practiced exercise, not mere information transfer.
Teaching rooted in disciplinary correction; learning through habituation and practiced exercise, not mere information transfer.
properly, to goad, i.e. (by implication) to teach (the rod being an Oriental incentive) BDB: exercise in Usage: (un-) accustomed, × diligently, expert, instruct, learn, skilful, teach(-er, -ing).
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.
Selected passage-level study witnesses for this word. This section is not the full occurrence list.
Showing 1 selected witness from 87 lexical occurrence verses.
לָמַד is a primitive root - no further derivation.
Judgment is intended to instruct, yet the wicked refuse. Isaiah 26:7-11
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
Lāmad refuses to let teachers treat their work as mere information transfer. The root image of the goad directing the path of an animal makes explicit what Deuteronomy assumes throughout: teaching is formation. What is being shaped is not a set of beliefs held in the mind but a pattern of life walked over time. Deuteronomy's model for Torah formation is immersive and continuous: teach your children when you sit, when you walk, when you lie down, when you rise.
The word is to saturate daily life so that the person being formed is literally walking in a direction. This has enormous implications for how communities approach discipleship. Programs and events can contribute to formation, but they cannot substitute for the daily, ordinary transmission of God's word in the rhythms of life — what Deuteronomy envisions as the parent who talks of these things on the way to the market.
The prophetic warning (Jer. 10. 2) adds the negative pressure: people are continually being formed by something. If the community is not deliberately being shaped by the word of God, it will be shaped by the patterns, fears, and assumptions of the surrounding culture. Teachers who understand lāmad know that their work is urgent precisely because formation is not neutral.
The Isaiah Servant's portrait of the taught tongue that can sustain the weary is the telos of formation: a person who has been shaped so thoroughly by hearing that they now have words for others in their exhaustion.
Isa.50.4
Lāmad in the Qal stem means to learn; in the Piel (causative-intensive) it means to teach or train. The root is related to an Aramaic cognate and may be connected etymologically to the noun limmûd (one who is taught, a disciple or student — used of the Servant's disciples in Isa.8.16 and the taught tongue in Isa.50.4). The word thus naturally produces both the teacher (the one who lāmads) and the taught (the limmûd), anticipating the discipleship relationship that Jesus makes explicit in the New Testament.
The trajectory from lāmad to the New Testament's discipleship vocabulary is direct. The Servant of Isaiah 50, with his taught tongue and receptive ear, becomes the model for Jesus himself as the perfectly formed Son who hears the Father and speaks what he hears (John 8. 28). Jesus' invitation to 'learn from me' (Matt. 11. 29) uses the Greek manthanō in the same formation sense lāmad carries — take my yoke, walk with me, be shaped by my ways.
His disciples (mathētai, from manthanō) are literally learners-being-formed. The Great Commission's 'teaching them to observe everything I have commanded' (Matt. 28. 20) is the lāmad commission carried to all nations: form people in the ways of Christ, not merely inform them of his teachings. Paul's insistence that the community be 'transformed by the renewing of your mind' (Rom.
12. 2) Is the epistolary form of the same impulse Deuteronomy expressed with lāmad: do not be conformed (formed by the world), but be transformed (formed by the Spirit through the word).
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