בָּלָק
Balak
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Balak’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H1111 appears in the Book of Joshua — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Joshua
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.
“Balak” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name בלק (Bâlâq). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Numbers. It appears 40 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its moderately common vocabulary. First canonically at Numbers 22:2, it enters the text early. See 40-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1111 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 →
- 40
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 40 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #837
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 837 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 40 occurrences in the concordance →
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 40 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 37 verses · 93%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 8%
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: Balak 40×
- American Standard Version: Balak 38×
- Berean Standard Bible: Balak 32×, Balak’s 2×, Now balak 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Balak 42×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1111 across 43 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H1111 across 43 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1111 across 39 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1111 across 43 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Balak = "devastator"
- a king of Moab who hired Balaam to curse Israel
Word origin
n.pr.m. (devastator) king of Moab, בּ׳ בֶּן צִפּוֹר Nu 22:2, 4, 7 + 37 times Nu 22–24 (all JE) + Jos 24:9 (E) Ju 11:25 Mi 6:5.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בלק (bâlaq) (H1110) — to devastate.
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.
בִּלָּק
- , v. בִּילָּק
בָּלָק
- (b. h.) pr. n. m. Balak, King of Moab. Ber. 7ᵃ. Num. R. s. 20; a. fr.
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 17 distinct written forms H1111 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בָּלָ֖ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:2 | 7 |
| בָּלָק֙ | Noun, Proper | Micah 6:5 | 7 |
| בָּלָ֔ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 23:1 | 6 |
| בָּלָ֑ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:14 | 5 |
| בָלָ֔ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:13 | 2 |
| בָלָֽק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:7 | 2 |
| בָּלָ֗ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:38 | 2 |
| בָּלָ֜ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:37 | 2 |
| בָּלָ֧ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:10 | 2 |
| בָלָ֛ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:18 | 1 |
| בָלָ֜ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 24:13 | 1 |
| בָלָ֤ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 23:7 | 1 |
| בָּלָ֣ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:16 | 1 |
| בָּלָ֤ק | Noun, Proper | Joshua 24:9 | 1 |
| וּ/בָלָ֧ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:4 | 1 |
| לְ/בָלָ֗ק | Noun, Proper | Numbers 23:3 | 1 |
| מִ/בָּלָ֥ק | Noun, Proper | Judges 11:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1111, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Balak). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Empty; spoiler, a son of Zippor, and king of the Moabites (Num. 22:2, 4). From fear of the Israelites, who were encamped near the confines of his territory, he applied to Balaam (q.v.) to curse them; but in vain (Josh. 24:9).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(spoiler), son of Zippor, king of the Moabites, who hired Balaam to curse the Israelites; but his designs were frustrated int he manner recorded in (Numbers 22:24) (B.C. 1451.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
who lays waste or destroys
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 40 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 40 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.
