Bible word study

Chay (Strong’s H2416): Meaning in the Bible

Chay (חַי) is the Hebrew word numbered H2416 in Strong’s concordance of the Bible. Strong’s defines it as alive; hence, raw (flesh); fresh (plant, water, year), strong; also (as noun, especially in the feminine singular and masculine plural) life (or living thing), whether literally or figuratively. In the King James Bible it is translated age, alive, appetite, (wild) beast, company.

• Original wordחַי
• Transliterationchay
• Pronunciationkhah'-ee
• Part of speech(a n-m n-f)
• Strong’s numberH2416
• LanguageHebrew

The full Strong’s definition

Derivation. from H2421;

How the King James Bible translates it

Where Chay appears in the Bible

In the King James Bible’s text tagged with Strong’s numbers, Chay (H2416) stands behind 498 English renderings in 449 verses across 29 of the 66 books. It is most frequent in Genesis (66), Ezekiel (58), Psalms (51).

How the King James Bible renders Chay, by count

• life144 of 498 (29 percent)
• living78 of 498 (16 percent)
• liveth66 of 498 (13 percent)
• live44 of 498 (9 percent)
• beasts42 of 498 (8 percent)
• beast34 of 498 (7 percent)

Three places to read Chay

• Genesis 1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
• 1 Samuel 26:16 This thing is not good that thou hast done. As the LORD liveth, ye are worthy to die, because ye have not kept your master, the LORD’s anointed. And now see where the king’s spear is, and the cruse of water that was at his bolster.
• Proverbs 9:11 For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased.

Counts are made at build time from the King James text tagged with Strong’s numbers (eBible.org, public domain). Verses are read from the stored King James text, never typed.

Why the word matters

Every word the biblical writers chose carries weight. Studying Chay in the original Hebrew lets you read the passages where it appears more carefully, closer to what the first hearers understood, so the meaning is drawn from the text itself rather than from the English alone.

The lexical data on this page comes from the public-domain Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890), a Hebrew and Greek dictionary keyed to the King James Bible. It is a reference tool, not a settled verdict: no single word decides a doctrine, and meaning is finally shaped by how a word is used in its sentences. Read the passages themselves, prayerfully, and in full.

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