sister
a.chot denotes a female sibling, and also marks paired items or personified communities as sisters.
The word most often identifies a woman in a family relationship, whether named within genealogies or addressed and described amid family events. It also applies to matching or corresponding physical items and to personified communities portrayed as sisters.
Senses in use
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Female family member · dominant
In genealogical notices, the construct noun identifies named women in relation to male relatives: in 1 Chronicles 1:39 the APB renders Timna as “the sister of Lotan,” and in 1 Chronicles 3:9 it names Tamar as “their sister.” In the Tamar narrative, the same construct form marks the family relationship repeatedly; in 2 Samuel 13:5 the APB renders Amnon's request, “Let my sister Tamar come,” while 2 Samuel 13:22 describes the wrong done to “his sister Tamar.”
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Corresponding item paired with another · occasional
The construct form is used of nonhuman items arranged in matching relation. In Exodus 26:3 the APB renders the curtain groups as joined “one to another,” and Exodus 26:6 describes the curtains being joined “woman to her sister”; Ezekiel 1:9 likewise renders the creatures' wings as touching “one another.”
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Personified sister community · occasional
In Ezekiel's comparison of communities, the construct noun frames Samaria and Sodom as the addressee's sisters. In Ezekiel 16:46 the APB calls Samaria the “older sister” and Sodom the “younger sister,” and Ezekiel 16:49 continues the comparison with “Sodom your sister”; Ezekiel 23:32 similarly speaks of drinking “the cup of your sister.”
In the Anselm Paraphrase: The APB commonly presents the term with “sister” in family and personified-community settings, including “the sister of Aaron” in Exodus 15:20 and “Sodom your sister” in Ezekiel 16:49. In object-pairing clauses it instead uses expressions such as “one to another”; because the paraphrase is not word-aligned, these English expressions reflect the clauses rather than fixed renderings of the term.