קָמָה
qa.mah
standing grain
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# Qamah: Standing Grain in Biblical Hebrew The Hebrew word *qamah* denotes standing grain—grain still growing or standing in the field before harvest. This concrete agricultural term appears ten times throughout the biblical text, reflecting its importance to an agrarian society. The word describes grain in its vertical, pre-harvested state, distinguishing it from processed grain, flour, or harvested sheaves. The relatively modest frequency of *qamah* (ten occurrences) suggests it was used when the specific condition of the grain—its standing posture in the field—carried particular significance for the narrative or context at hand. Rather than being a common everyday term, it appears to have been deployed when the visual or temporal state of the unharvested crop mattered to the author's meaning. This usage pattern indicates that biblical writers were attentive to agricultural cycles and the various states of grain production. Without access to the specific passages in which *qamah* appears, we can establish only that the word carries straightforward descriptive meaning tied to observable agricultural reality. It represents the period between growth and harvest when grain stands upright in the field—a crucial stage in the agricultural year for ancient Mediterranean farming communities.
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
10 total occurrences across the text
It will be like when the harvester gathers the wheat, and his arm reaps the grain. Yes, it will be like when one gleans grain in the valley of Rephaim.
Isaiah 37:27Therefore their inhabitants had little power. They were dismayed and confounded. They were like the grass of the field, and like the green herb, like the grass on the housetops, and like a field before its crop has grown.
Hosea 8:7For they sow the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind. He has no standing grain. The stalk will yield no head. If it does yield, strangers will swallow it up.
Exodus 22:6“If fire breaks out, and catches in thorns so that the shocks of grain, or the standing grain, or the field are consumed; he who kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.
Deuteronomy 16:9You shall count for yourselves seven weeks. From the time you begin to put the sickle to the standing grain you shall begin to count seven weeks.
Deuteronomy 23:25When you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, then you may pluck the ears with your hand; but you shall not use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.
Deuteronomy 23:25When you come into your neighbor’s standing grain, then you may pluck the ears with your hand; but you shall not use a sickle on your neighbor’s standing grain.
Judges 15:5When he had set the torches on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, and also the olive groves.
Judges 15:5When he had set the torches on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burned up both the shocks and the standing grain, and also the olive groves.
2 Kings 19:26Therefore their inhabitants had little power. They were dismayed and confounded. They were like the grass of the field, and like the green herb, like the grass on the housetops, and like grain blasted before it has grown up.