רְעוּת

# The Hebrew Word for Neighbor: רְעוּת (re'ut) The Hebrew term רְעוּת (re'ut) denotes a "neighbor" and appears six times throughout the biblical text. This noun refers to someone who lives in proximity to another person, establishing a relational category based on physical proximity rather than kinship. The word's limited frequency in biblical literature—just six occurrences—suggests it addressed a specific social concern rather than a commonly discussed relationship. The rarity of this particular form is noteworthy. While the concept of neighborliness appears frequently in biblical law and wisdom literature, this specific noun form (re'ut) was apparently used only occasionally, possibly because other related terms conveyed similar meanings more commonly. The six attestations indicate that biblical authors did employ this word when they needed to designate the social relationship between geographically adjacent households or communities. This modest presence in the biblical corpus means the word functioned as one option among perhaps several ways to express neighbor relations, rather than as the dominant or exclusive term for this concept. Without additional lexical data about its usage patterns across specific biblical books or contexts, we can conclude that רְעוּת represents a straightforward designation for people living near one another—a basic social category that biblical communities recognized and occasionally named with this particular word.