בָּעָה
to seek
‘to seek’ is one of 5 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘of rising desire’
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where H1158 appears in the Niphal stem in the Book of Isaiah. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Isaiah
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.
The Hebrew verb בעה centers on the idea of “to seek.” It is rare — just 4 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 3 of 4 verses. Debuting at Isaiah 21:12, it then recurs through the corpus. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Niphal. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1158 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 100%
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: Boil 1×, Enquire 1×, Swelling out 1×
- American Standard Version: Boil 1×, Inquire 1×, Swelling out 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Boil 1×, Bulge 1×, Inquire 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Being searched out 1×, Boils 1×, Bulge 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1158 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1158 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1158 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1158 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 3 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- 1. of rising desire, seek, inquire
- 2. cause to boil up
Niphal
- . searched out; swelling, swelling out
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
[ בָּעָה ] vb. inquire, cause to swell or boil up
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
בָּעָה
- , v. בעי
בעי
- א, a) to enter into, split; b) to be empty, bare). Part. בּוֹעֶה, v. infra.
- to lay bare, destroy the crop. B. Kam. I, 1 המַבְעֶה damaging the crop (ref. to Ex. XXII, 4). Ib. 3ᵇ Rab says מבעה זה אדם the damaging force in the Mishnah means that of a human being (ransacking, searching); for we read (Is. XXI, 12) אם תבעיון בעיו if ye desire to enter &c. (where בעה refers to human action); Samuel says, מבעה זה השן the mabeh of the Mishnah refers to the tooth, i.e. to an animal’s eating up the crop, for it says (Ob. I, 6) נבעו מצפניו its hidden treasures were laid bare (made empty,—which refers to eating up). Ib. (argument against Samuel) מי קתני נִבְעָה the Mishnah does not use the Nifal (which may mean eaten up); (argument against Rab) מי קתני בּוֹעֶה the Mishnah does not use the Kal (which may refer to human action) but the Hifil “to cause damage”—through the animal.—Tosef. ib. IX, 1. e.g. Exodus 22:4
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 5 distinct written forms H1158 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּעָ֖יוּ | Verb, Qal, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Isaiah 21:12 | 1 |
| נִבְע֖וּ | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Obadiah 1:6 | 1 |
| נִבְעֶ֖ה | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 30:13 | 1 |
| תִּבְעֶה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Isaiah 64:2 | 1 |
| תִּבְעָי֥וּ/ן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Isaiah 21:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1158, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
