בְּכֹרָה
birthright
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Both
- Attested as both masculine and feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1062 appears in the Book of Deuteronomy — 4 distinct verses. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Deuteronomy
- Deuteronomy 12:6 וּ/בְכֹרֹ֥ת conj + n c bp cs and there you shall bring your burnt offerings, and your sacrifices, and your tithes, and the heave-offering of your hand, and your vows, and your freewill-offerings, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock:
- Deuteronomy 12:17 וּ/בְכֹרֹ֥ת conj + n c bp cs You may not eat within your gates the tithe of your grain, or of your new wine, or of your oil, or the firstborn of your herd or of your flock, nor any of your vows which you vow, nor your freewill-offerings, nor the heave-offering of your hand;
- Deuteronomy 14:23 וּ/בְכֹרֹ֥ת conj + n c bp cs You shall eat before Yahweh your God, in the place which he shall choose, to cause his name to dwell there, the tithe of your grain, of your new wine, and of your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and of your flock; that you may learn to fear Yahweh your God always.
- Deuteronomy 21:17 הַ/בְּכֹרָֽה ptcl def.art + n c bs but he shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the hated, by giving him a double portion of all that he has; for he is the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn is his.
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
בכורה — transliterated bᵉkôwrâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “birthright.” More than half of its appearances fall in Genesis. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 13 verses — uncommon. Debuting at Genesis 4:4, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with בכור and בכורת. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1062 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,910
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,910 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 7 verses 54%
- Deuteronomy 4 verses 31%
- 1 Chronicles 2 verses 15%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 13 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 11 verses · 85%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 15%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Birthright 6×, Firstlings 4×
- American Standard Version: Birthright 5×, Firstlings 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Birthright 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Birthright 7×, Firstborn of 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1062 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1062 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1062 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1062 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- birthright, primogeniture, right of the first-born
Word origin
n.f. right of first-born Gn 25:32, 34 (J) Dt 21:17; 1 Ch 5:1, 2; sf. בְּכֹרָתִי Gn 27:36 (JE); בְּכֹרָתְךָ Gn 25:31 (J); בְּכֹרָתוֹ Gn 25:33; 43:33 (J) 1 Ch 5:1.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בכור (bᵉkôwr) (H1060) — firstborn.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
בִּכּוּרָה
- early fruit, esp. fig.
- Pl. בִּכּוּרוֹת. Gen. R. s. 22 היה אוכל הב׳ וכ׳ ate the early fruits himself and offered the late to the king. Snh. 91ᵇ; Lev. R. s. 4 ב׳ נאות fine early figs. Ter. IV, 6 בב׳ at the time of early ripening.—2) Pl. בִּכּוּרִים m. (b. h.) first fruits (to be offered), (sub. מנחת) offering of first fruits. Bicc. I, 1; a. fr.—Biccurim, name of a treatise of the Mishnah, belonging to the order of Seeds (זרעים).
בְּכוֹרָה
- 1. first-born. Pl. בְּכוֹרוֹת. Ex. R. s. 18 הנקבות הב׳ the first-born females (in Egypt).
- 2. first birth, birth-right. B. Bath. 123ᵃ נטל ב׳ מראובן וכ׳ took the birth-right from Reuben and gave it to Joseph. Ib. ראויה היתה ב׳ וכ׳ the first birth (of Jacob’s children) was destined to issue from Rachel. Ib. 124ᵃ חלק ב׳ the share of the first-born; a. fr.
- 3. the law appertaining to first-born animals, v. בְּכוֹר.—Bekh. I, 1 חייב בב׳ is subject to the law &c., פטור מן הב׳ is exempt from &c.; a. v. fr.—Pl. בְּכוֹרוֹת, v. supra a. בְּכוֹר.—B’khoroth (Bekh.), name of a Talmudic treatise, belonging to the order of Kodashim (קדשים).
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 11 distinct written forms H1062 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/בְכֹרֹ֥ת | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Construct | Deuteronomy 12:6 | 3 |
| הַ/בְּכֹרָֽה | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 21:17 | 2 |
| בְּכֹ֣רָת֔/וֹ | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | 1 Chronicles 5:1 | 1 |
| בְּכֹֽרָתְ/ךָ֖ | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | Genesis 25:31 | 1 |
| בְּכֹרָֽה | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 25:32 | 1 |
| בְּכֹרָת֖/וֹ | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | Genesis 25:33 | 1 |
| בְּכֹרָתִ֣/י | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | Genesis 27:36 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/בְּכֹרָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 5:2 | 1 |
| כִּ/בְכֹ֣רָת֔/וֹ | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | Genesis 43:33 | 1 |
| לַ/בְּכֹרָֽה | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 5:1 | 1 |
| מִ/בְּכֹר֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Construct | Genesis 4:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1062, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 13 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
