A field (as flat)
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H7704 names a field or open country, with context deciding whether the land is cultivated property, pasture, countryside, battlefield, or exposed space beyond a city. Leviticus 19:9 treats a field as productive land whose harvest must leave room for poor and foreign neighbors.
Reader summary
Full entry for שָׂדֶה (H7704) · Open the biblical lexicon
H7704 names a field or open country, with context deciding whether the land is cultivated property, pasture, countryside, battlefield, or exposed space beyond a city. Leviticus 19:9 treats a field as productive land whose harvest must leave room for poor and foreign neighbors.
The BSB source-word alignment has 333 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include of the field (58), in the field (39), the field (20), field (15), . . . (10).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 2:5. Its strongest book concentrations include Genesis (48), Jeremiah (27), Ezekiel (26), Leviticus (25).
H7704 names a field or open country, with context deciding whether the land is cultivated property, pasture, countryside, battlefield, or exposed space beyond a city. Leviticus 19:9 treats a field as productive land whose harvest must leave room for poor and foreign neighbors. Proverbs 31:16 presents a woman appraising and purchasing a field, then planting a vineyard from her earnings.
Micah 2:2 condemns powerful people who covet and seize fields, tying land theft to the destruction of homes and inheritance. In other narratives, the field may be a place of labor, danger, hiding, burial, battle, or encounter. The noun itself is concrete, but fields become morally significant through ownership, labor, access, safety, and fruit. Scripture does not romanticize rural land.
It can sustain households, expose workers to harm, become an object of predatory accumulation, or carry laws that restrain total extraction. H7704 helps teachers keep material life visible: discipleship concerns soil, work, property, food, and the treatment of people whose survival depends on access to the harvest. The field is not merely a decorative metaphor; it is often someone’s livelihood and inheritance.
H7704 spreads across agricultural work, gleaning justice, inheritance, commerce, battle, exposure, and creation praise. The biblical field is productive and vulnerable space where stewardship, labor, property, safety, and neighbor care become visible.
When you reap the harvest of your land, you are not to reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.
Israel must not harvest to the field’s edges or collect every gleaning, so productive land is governed by a holiness practice that makes material room for vulnerable neighbors.
They covet fields and seize them; they take away houses. They deprive a man of his home, a fellow man of his inheritance.
Micah condemns those who covet and seize fields and houses, exposing land acquisition as violence when power strips a household of home and inheritance.
She appraises a field and buys it; from her earnings she plants a vineyard.
The capable woman evaluates and buys a field, then plants a vineyard from her earnings, portraying economic judgment, productive agency, and long-range household provision.
Let your eyes be on the field they are harvesting, and follow along after these girls. Indeed, I have ordered the young men not to touch you. And when you are thirsty, go and drink from the jars the young men have filled.”
Boaz directs Ruth toward a particular field, orders the young men not to touch her, and provides water, joining gleaning access to concrete workplace safety.
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. Cultivated or uncultivated land marked by openness and flatness, contrasting enclosed dwellings and urban spaces
Cultivated or uncultivated land marked by openness and flatness, contrasting enclosed dwellings and urban spaces
a field (as flat) BDB: field Usage: country, field, ground, land, soil, × wild.
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 334 lexical occurrence verses.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
H7704 keeps biblical faith close to the ground. Leviticus refuses an extraction model in which a landholder’s right to harvest eliminates every margin for the poor and foreign resident. The field remains productive property, but its edges become a practiced confession that the Lord’s holiness orders economic life. Ruth adds relational and safety detail: gleaning access is not sufficient if a vulnerable worker can be harassed or assaulted, so Boaz gives explicit protection and water.
Proverbs 31 portrays a woman exercising disciplined economic agency as she considers land and invests her earnings in a vineyard. Micah confronts the opposite use of power, where desire becomes seizure and fields are taken along with houses and inheritance. The same noun can also name battlefields, burial fields, open country, and the habitat of creatures. These settings resist a sentimental picture of land.
Fields feed people, reward labor, hold memory, expose bodies, and attract exploitation. Faithful teaching should honor ownership without absolutizing it, praise industry without excusing exhaustion, defend vulnerable access without romanticizing poverty, and condemn predatory acquisition. H7704 invites churches to ask whether their use of land, money, work, and institutional property leaves truthful edges for neighbor care and protects those whose labor makes abundance possible.
Lev.19.9
H7704 is a Hebrew noun broad enough for cultivated field, open land, countryside, or the terrain outside a settlement. Possessors, crops, prepositions, and narrative setting determine whether the focus is property, agriculture, exposure, habitat, or battle.
New Testament field imagery includes harvest, seed, treasure, labor, and judgment, while apostolic teaching addresses work, generosity, and protection of vulnerable people. Those themes echo the material concerns surrounding H7704, but each parable and instruction must be interpreted from its own wording and setting.