Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

בְּקִיעַ

cleft

H1233 Strong's Hebrew
bᵉqîyaʻ Transliteration
/bek-ee'-ah/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

בקיע (bᵉqîyaʻ) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “cleft.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. It first appears in Isaiah 22:9. Related forms include בקע, בקע and בקעה. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
breach
Modern gloss
cleft
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H1233 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Isaiah 22:9
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Isaiah 22:9.
Amos 6:11
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Amos 6:11.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 2 · 100%

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 2 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 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: Breaches 1×, Clefts 1×
  • American Standard Version: Breaches 1×, Clefts 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Breaches 1×, Rubble 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bits 1×, Breaches of 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H1233 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breaches” 1×
  • “Clefts” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H1233 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breaches” 1×
  • “Clefts” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H1233 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breaches” 1×
  • “Rubble” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H1233 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bits” 1×
  • “Breaches of” 1×

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.

  1. fissure, breach, cleft

Word origin

[ בְּקִיעַ, בָּקִיעַ ] n.[m.] fissure, breach

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from בקע (bâqaʻ) (H1234) — to split.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 271c


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.

בְּקִיעַ I

  • (בקע; cmp. בִּצְעָה) fissure, ditch, esp. small pond for washing clothes. M. Kat. 8ᵇ נברכת וב׳, expl. as גיהא ובר גיהא a large pond and a small pond. Tosef. B. Bath. I, 2. Ib. M. Kat. I, 9 זו היא נ׳ … ב׳ Nibrekheth a. B’kia are the same; Y. ib. I, 80ᵈ כל שהוא תושב וכ׳ any permanent cut in the ground is called בקיע (fissure, a grave, wash-pond &c.). [Another opin. in Ar. ב׳ = אבן ב׳ a flat stone whereon washers beat their clothes; Y. l. c. כל שהוא וכ׳ any stone fixed in the ground is called a b’kia.—Ms. M. a. ed. Ven. נְקִיעַ, v. נֶקַע.]

בְּקִיעַ II

  • (בקע = בקא) = בָּקִיא. Snh. 5ᵇ ב׳ במומי (Ms. M. פקיע) an expert in judging bodily defects. B. Bath. 164ᵇ בקיע some ed. (Ms. M. בקי, F. פקיע).—Pl. בְּקִיעִין, בְּקִיעֵי. Targ. I Chr. XII, 32 Var., v. בָּקִי. Shebu. 42ᵃ דכמה דנפישי בקיעי טפי (some ed. בקיאי, Ms. F. פ׳) the majority of the experts are supposed to be better versed (than the minority).

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 2 distinct written forms H1233 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
בְּקִיעֵ֧י Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct Isaiah 22:9 1
בְּקִעִֽים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Amos 6:11 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1233, 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

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.