The belly , especially the womb ; also the bosom or body of anything
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H990 is a Hebrew noun for the belly, womb, inner body, or the rounded interior of something. Jeremiah 1:5 speaks of God's knowledge of Jeremiah before forming him in the womb and of the prophet's particular calling before birth.
Reader summary
Full entry for בֶּטֶן (H990) · Open the biblical lexicon
H990 is a Hebrew noun for the belly, womb, inner body, or the rounded interior of something. Jeremiah 1:5 speaks of God's knowledge of Jeremiah before forming him in the womb and of the prophet's particular calling before birth.
The BSB source-word alignment has 72 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include . . . (8), womb (8), from the womb (7), of your womb (4), of the womb (3).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Genesis 25:23. Its strongest book concentrations include Job (16), Psalms (10), Isaiah (8), Proverbs (8).
H990 is a Hebrew noun for the belly, womb, inner body, or the rounded interior of something. Jeremiah 1:5 speaks of God's knowledge of Jeremiah before forming him in the womb and of the prophet's particular calling before birth. Ecclesiastes 5:15 uses the mother's womb to frame the nakedness with which a person enters and leaves life, exposing the limits of accumulated wealth.
Ezekiel 3:3 uses the word for the stomach the prophet fills with the scroll God gives him, joining bodily imagery with reception of the divine message. Other passages speak of pregnancy, descendants as fruit of the womb, physical hunger, internal trembling, injury, and the belly of Sheol. The context must decide whether H990 is anatomical, reproductive, emotional, architectural, or metaphorical.
It opens teaching on God's creative knowledge, embodied dependence, prophetic vocation, mortality, hunger, and lament. It corrects both the reduction of persons to reproductive capacity and the use of womb texts as slogans that ignore grief, infertility, violence, or the passage's specific covenant setting.
H990 names the bodily belly or womb and can extend to an inner cavity or figurative interior. Its uses include conception and birth, descendants, appetite, internal distress, prophetic reception, mortality, and poetic confinement. The noun's theological significance comes from the action and literary setting around it.
“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”
God's prior knowledge, formation, consecration, and appointment of Jeremiah establish the prophet's vocation as divine initiative rather than self-invention.
As a man came from his mother’s womb, so he will depart again, naked as he arrived. He takes nothing for his labor to carry in his hands.
The return from life as naked as one came from the mother's womb exposes the inability of wealth to accompany its owner through death.
“Son of man,” He said to me, “eat and fill your stomach with this scroll I am giving you.” So I ate, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth.
Ezekiel fills his stomach with the given scroll, embodying his reception of a message that tastes sweet before he must bear and proclaim it.
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. The womb as life-source: inner receptacle where human existence originates and develops before birth.
The womb as life-source: inner receptacle where human existence originates and develops before birth.
the belly, especially the womb; also the bosom or body of anything BDB: belly Usage: belly, body, as they be born, within, womb.
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 72 lexical occurrence verses.
Compound and idiomatic phrases that include this word. Follow a link to study the phrase and how its parts work together.
H990 places much of biblical life inside the vulnerable reality of bodies. The womb can be the hidden place where God forms and knows, as Jeremiah's call makes clear, but that verse speaks first about God's appointment of a particular prophet within the book's covenant crisis. It should inspire trust in divine initiative without becoming a promise that every life will follow Jeremiah's vocation.
Ecclesiastes uses the womb to mark the limits of possession: people arrive without wealth and cannot carry their gains through death. Ezekiel's stomach becomes part of prophetic obedience when he receives the scroll before speaking its words. Elsewhere the same noun can name hunger, trembling, injury, pregnancy, offspring, or the depths of Sheol. This range resists any teaching that equates a person with one bodily function.
Scripture honors embodied life while also speaking honestly about reproductive grief, violence, appetite, and mortality. H990 therefore calls communities to receive bodies as creaturely gifts, protect vulnerable people, feed the hungry, and handle pregnancy-related texts with truth and tenderness. God's knowledge is intimate, but human interpreters must not claim access to every hidden purpose or use sacred language to control another person's body.
Jer.1.5
H990 is a concrete noun whose reference can shift among belly, womb, stomach, inner body, and the interior or rounded body of an object. Phrases such as fruit of the womb use the bodily term relationally for offspring, while poetry can extend interiority to distress or confinement.
The New Testament continues biblical attention to conception, embodied life, hunger, prophetic calling, and mortality. Those canonical themes may illuminate H990, but later debates or Greek vocabulary should not be read back as though this Hebrew noun alone settles them.