בָּעַת
to terrify
also: startle, fall upon, dismay 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem. Here: ‘fall upon’
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Jussive
- A third- or second-person volitional form expressing wish or command (“let him write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H1204 appears in the Book of Esther — 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.
Esther
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.
בעת — transliterated bâʻath — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to terrify.” Its uses cluster heavily in Job (50% of all occurrences). With 16 verses in 8 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in 1 Samuel 16:14. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Niphal and Piel. 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 H1204 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 →
- 16
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 16 distinct verses.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,752
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,752 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 16 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 16 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 12 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 25%
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: Made me afraid 2×, Shall make him afraid 2×, Terrify 2×
- American Standard Version: Made me afraid 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Overwhelmed me 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Terrified me 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1204 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 H1204 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 13 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 H1204 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 14 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 H1204 across 22 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 20 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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 4 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.
Niphal
- . be terrified
Piel
- . (mostly poet.)
- 1. fall upon; overwhelm; assail
- 2. terrify
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
[ בָּעַת ] vb. fall upon, startle, terrify
— 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.
בָּעַת
- ; interch. with בָּהַת q. v.) to startle. [Not used in Kal.]
- to be startled, frightened, confounded. Num. R. s. 18; Tanḥ. Korah 6 נזדעזע אהרן ונ׳ Aaron trembled and was alarmed. Y. Shek. I, beg. Bab. ed. נִבָּעֵית, v. בָּהַת.
- to frighten, bewilder. Yoma V, 1 (52ᵇ) שלא להַבְעִית וכ׳ in order not to alarm the people (by a long delay). Ib. 39ᵇ למה אתה מבעית עצמך why wilt thou be the alarmer thyself (predicting thine own destruction; Ms. M. a. Yalk. Zech. 578 את עצמך, incorr.; Ms. Oxf. בעצמך; Y. ib. VI, 43ᶜ bot. מבהלינו, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note).
- to be agitated, excited. Y. Sabb. VI, 8ᵇ top שהוא מִתְבָּעֵת for he is excited.
בְּעֵת
- (v. preced.) to be excited. Nidd. 66ᵇ משום דבעיתא because she is excited (afraid of falling down).
- to frighten. Targ. Ps. XVIII, 5 (Ms. בְּעֵיתַת Pe.).—Keth. 77ᵇ דילמא מְבַעֲתַת לי lest thou frighten me. Ḥull. 53ᵃ sq. בַּעוּתֵי קא מְבַעֲתֵי אהדדי they frighten each other. Nidd. 66ᵃ זיל בַּעֲתָהּ go and frighten her (by a sudden noise).
- to be afraid; to be agitated, anxious, in haste (cmp. b. h. חָרַד). Targ. I Sam. XXI, 2. Targ. Is. XXII, 4. Targ. II Kings VII, 15 באִתְבְּעָתוּתְהוֹן Regia (ed. באתבעותהון); v. בְּעַע a. בְּעֵי I. Y. Ab. Zar. V, 44ᵈ bot. והוא מתבעת and he is afraid (to touch the wine).—Meg. 3ᵃ האי מאן דמִיבְּעִית when one is suddenly seized with fright. Ib. איבעיתו. Keth. 106ᵃ הוה מיבעית ליה בעותי he ran anxiously to meet him; cmp. Targ. I Sam. l. c.; a. fr.
עֵת
- , v. עוּד; or of ענת, v. עוֹנָה I) [duration, turn,]
- 1. ʿEth, the twenty-fourth part of an ʿonah. Tosef. Ber. I, 1; a. e., v. עוֹנָה I.
- 2. time. Pes. 109ᵃ; מימיו לא אמר הגיע עת לעמוד וכ׳ never in his life did he (R. ʿAḳiba) say, it is time to rise from (leave) the house of study, except &c.; Succ. 28ᵃ. Ber. 8ᵃ (ref. to Ps. LXIX, 14) אימתי עת רצון בשעה וכ׳ when is the time of favor? When the congregation is at prayer. Taan. 24ᵇ שמע מינה עת רצון היא I learn from this (dream) that this is an auspicious time for prayer. Yeb. 72ᵃ עת רצון מילתא היא there is something in the idea of a time of favor for prayer; a. fr.—מֵעֵת לָעֵת (abbrev. מעל"ע) the time of twenty-four astronomical hours. Nidd. I, 1 מעל"ע ממעטת עליד מפקידה לפקידה וכ׳ the term of twenty-four hours (of retrospective uncleanness) reduces the term of the interval from one examination to the other &c., i.e. we go by the shorter term whichever it may be. Ḥull. 51ᵇ; Zeb. 74ᵇ צריכה מעל"ע requires the intervening of twenty-four hours (before it may be slaughtered); a. fr.—Pl. עִתִּים, עִתּוֹת, עִי׳. R. Hash. 28ᵃ ע׳ חלים ע׳ שוטה (Tosef. Ter. I, 3 פעמים), v. חָלַם I. Tam. I, 2 לא כל הע׳ שוות the time (for the appearance of the superintendent) was not always the same. Y. Ber. IX, end, 14ᵈ (ref. to Ps. CXIX, 126) העושה תורתו ע׳ … מיפר ברית he who makes the study of the Law a matter of time, destroys the covenant. Sabb. 31ᵃ בשעה … נשאת ונתת באמונה קבעת ע׳ לתורה when man is brought up for judgment, he is asked, hast thou been dealing with integrity? hast thou had regular times for the study of the Law? Snh. 65ᵇ ע׳ ושעות, v. עוּן; a. e.—לְעִיתּוֹתֵי עֶרֶב at the evening appointments (when labor is stopped, the work reviewed, wages paid &c.), in gen. towards evening. Tosef. Ab. Zar. VII (VIII), 10; Bab. Ber. 65ᵃ. Y. Ber. II, 5ᶜ top. Y. Succ. IV, beg. 54ᵇ. Y. Yeb. XVI, 15ᵈ top לציצותי, Var. לציתותי (read: לציתותי ערב); a. e. e.g. Psalms 69:14
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 13 distinct written forms H1204 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1204, 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 16 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 16 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
- 1 Samuel 16:14
- 2 Samuel 22:5
- 1 Chronicles 21:30
- Esther 7:6
- Job 3:5
- Psalms 18:4
- Isaiah 21:4
- Daniel 8:17
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.
