בַּ֫עַל צְפוֹן
Baal-zephon
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Baal-zephon’ 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 H1189 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Exodus 2 verses
- Exodus 14:2 בַּ֣עַל צְפֹ֔ן n Proper n Proper "Speak to the children of Israel, that they turn back and encamp before Pihahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, before Baal Zephon. You shall encamp opposite it by the sea.
- Exodus 14:9 בַּ֥עַל צְפֹֽן n Proper n Proper The Egyptians pursued after them: all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh, his horsemen, and his army; and overtook them encamping by the sea, beside Pihahiroth, before Baal Zephon.
Numbers 1 verse
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.
At its core, בעל צפון (Baʻal Tsᵉphôwn) means “Baal-zephon.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Exodus (67% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Exodus 14:2. 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 H1189 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 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: Baalzephon 2×
- American Standard Version: Baal-zephon 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Baal-zephon 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Baal 2×, Baal zephon 2×, Zephon 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1189 across 3 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1189 across 3 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1189 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1189 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Baal Tsphon or Baal-zephon = "lord of the north"
- a place in Egypt near the Red Sea where Pharaoh and his army were destroyed during the Exodus
Word origin
בַ֫עַל צְפוֹן n.pr.loc. near Red Sea in Egypt
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בעל (Baʻal) (H1168) — Baal.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H1189 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּ֣עַל | Noun, Proper | Exodus 14:2 | 2 |
| בַּ֥עַל | Noun, Proper | Exodus 14:9 | 1 |
| צְפ֑וֹן | Noun, Proper | Numbers 33:7 | 1 |
| צְפֹ֔ן | Noun, Proper | Exodus 14:2 | 1 |
| צְפֹֽן | Noun, Proper | Exodus 14:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1189, 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
Shares the same root
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- Βααλ Báal G896 Baal
- בל Bêl H1078 Bel
- בעל ברית Baʻal Bᵉrîyth H1170 Baal-berith
- בעל גד Baʻal Gâd H1171 Baal-gad
- בעל זבוב Baʻal Zᵉbûwb H1176 Baal-zebub
- בעלידע Bᵉʻelyâdâʻ H1182 Beeliada
- בעל מעון Baʻal Mᵉʻôwn H1186 Baal-meon
- בעל פעור Baʻal Pᵉʻôwr H1187 Baal-peor
- בעל שלשה Baʻal Shâlishâh H1190 Baal-shalisha
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. 10 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Baal-zephon). 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
Baal of the north, an Egyptian town on the shores of the Gulf of Suez (Ex. 14:2; Num. 33:7), over against which the children of Israel encamped before they crossed the Red Sea. It is probably to be identified with the modern Jebel Deraj or Kulalah, on the western shore of the Gulf of Suez. Baal-zapuna of the Egyptians was a place of worship.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
the idol or possession of the north; hidden; secret
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
