To sing
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H7891, šiyr, is a Hebrew verb for singing. Its contexts make singing a voiced response that can remember deliverance, praise the LORD, proclaim salvation, teach a community, accompany ordered worship, or carry grief that ordinary speech cannot contain.
Reader summary
Full entry for שִׁיר (H7891) · Open the biblical lexicon
H7891, šiyr, is a Hebrew verb for singing. Its contexts make singing a voiced response that can remember deliverance, praise the LORD, proclaim salvation, teach a community, accompany ordered worship, or carry grief that ordinary speech cannot contain.
The BSB source-word alignment has 87 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include Sing (15), I will sing (9), singers (7), The singers (6), for the singers (5).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Exodus 15:1. Its strongest book concentrations include Psalms (27), Nehemiah (17), 2 Chronicles (9), 1 Chronicles (8).
H7891, šiyr, is a Hebrew verb for singing. Its contexts make singing a voiced response that can remember deliverance, praise the Lord, proclaim salvation, teach a community, accompany ordered worship, or carry grief that ordinary speech cannot contain. Moses and Israel sing after rescue at the sea. Deborah and Barak sing about the Lord's action amid national danger. Psalms call all the earth to sing and declare His salvation, while another psalm asks how the Lord's song can be sung under the demands of captors. The action is embodied and communal, but it can also rise from one suffering voice.
Biblical singing is not limited to cheerful mood. Psalm 13 moves from “How long?” to trust and song without pretending the distress never existed. Jeremiah 20 places a call to sing beside persecution and, immediately afterward, a curse on the day of his birth. Psalm 137 refuses to turn Zion's song into entertainment for tormentors. These passages protect lament, silence, and protest from the demand to perform happiness. They also show that singing can sustain memory and faith when circumstances remain painful. A congregation should therefore make room for praise, confession, sorrow, thanksgiving, longing, and hope rather than treating one emotional register as the measure of faith.
The object and content of song matter. Psalm 96 joins singing to proclaiming the Lord's salvation among all peoples. Isaiah 42 summons coastlands, deserts, villages, and mountaintops into praise of the Lord who announces new things. Jeremiah sings because God rescues the needy from evildoers. Appointed singers in Chronicles serve ordered public worship, yet their presence before an army does not turn music into a technique that guarantees victory. Faithful singing responds to who God is and what He has done; it does not manipulate Him, prove a singer's spirituality, or excuse injustice. Musical skill can serve the community, but neither vocal ability, cultural style, emotional display, nor platform access determines a person's worth before God.
H7891 portrays singing as a voiced response to God's deliverance, kingship, holiness, salvation, care for the needy, and sustaining devotion, while also preserving lament and resistance to coerced performance.
Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: “I will sing to the Lord, for He is highly exalted. The horse and rider He has thrown into the sea.
Israel sings after the Lord's deliverance at the sea. The song remembers rescue from oppression and exalts the Deliverer rather than presenting music as the cause of victory.
Listen, O kings! Give ear, O princes! I will sing to the Lord; I will sing praise to the Lord, the God of Israel.
Deborah's song publicly addresses rulers while praising the God of Israel. Sung testimony can interpret history and confront power from within a particular covenant story.
Then Jehoshaphat consulted with the people and appointed those who would sing to the Lord and praise the splendor of His holiness. As they went out before the army, they were singing: “Give thanks to the Lord, for His loving devotion endures forever.”
Appointed singers confess the Lord's enduring devotion as Judah faces invasion. The narrative celebrates trust in God's word, not a repeatable musical strategy for defeating enemies.
I will sing to the Lord, for He has been good to me.
The closing resolve to sing grows from lament, petition, trust, and remembered goodness. Song can voice faith without erasing the suffering that shaped the prayer.
Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth.
The summons expands to all the earth and immediately joins song with blessing God's name and proclaiming His salvation among the nations.
How can we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land?
Exiles resist captors who demand joyful performance while Jerusalem's loss remains raw. The question protects grief, memory, and worship from exploitation.
Sing to the Lord a new song—His praise from the ends of the earth—you who go down to the sea, and all that is in it, you islands, and all who dwell in them.
The new song answers the Lord's unique glory and announced new work, gathering distant peoples and places into praise without erasing their particular locations.
Sing to the Lord! Praise the Lord! For He rescues the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers.
Jeremiah calls for song because God rescues the needy, even as the surrounding lament records persecution and anguish. Praise and pain stand together in one prophetic life.
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. Music as both liturgical act and expression of covenant joy, often celebrating God's mighty deeds
Music as both liturgical act and expression of covenant joy, often celebrating God's mighty deeds
to sing BDB: sing Usage: behold (by mistake for 7789), sing(-er, -ing man, -ing woman).
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 88 lexical occurrence verses.
שִׁיר is built from this root:
H7891 shows singing as truth carried through a human voice and shared memory. Israel sings because the Lord rescued the oppressed at the sea. Deborah's song names divine action before rulers. Psalm 96 turns song outward into daily proclamation of salvation, and Isaiah 42 imagines praise rising from the ends of the earth. Yet the verb also lives inside lament: Psalm 13 sings after “How long?
”, Jeremiah praises beside despair, and Psalm 137 refuses a captor's demand for cheerful performance. Chronicles demonstrates ordered musical service but does not offer song as a mechanism for obtaining military success. The pastoral center is therefore neither style nor emotional intensity. Faithful singing gives fitting voice to God's truth in a real circumstance and helps a people remember, confess, grieve, give thanks, and hope together.
Churches should cultivate sound doctrine, accessible participation, skilled service without celebrity, space for lament, cultural hospitality, and ethical lives that agree with what the congregation sings.
Ps.96.1
H7891 is a Hebrew verb attested chiefly in the Qal stem, with additional Polel and Hophal forms in the governed morphology witness. It names the act of singing, while the closely related H7892 names a song or singing as a formed expression. The verb does not itself specify musical style, instrumentation, skill level, volume, congregational arrangement, or emotional tone.
Those features come from each passage. A verbal form may describe appointed singers as people engaged in the action without making performance office the word's basic meaning.
New Testament believers continue to sing to God and to one another as the word of Christ dwells richly among them and the Spirit fills the community. Revelation's songs center on the slain Lamb, redemption across peoples, and God's just ways. These continuities deepen Israel's sung memory without making every Old Testament battle scene a template for Christian conflict.