גָּמָא
to swallow
‘to swallow’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Hiphil verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperative, 2nd Person, Feminine, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1572 appears — 2 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Job 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.
גמא (gâmâʼ) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to swallow.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Genesis, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 24:17. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Piel and Hiphil. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1572 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.
- #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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: He swalloweth 1×, Let me i pray thee drink 1×
- American Standard Version: Give me to drink 1×, He swalloweth 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He devours 1×, Let me have 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Let me drink 1×, Swallows 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1572 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1572 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1572 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1572 across 2 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 2 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.
Piel
- . fig. of horse in swift gallop
Hiphil
- . let me drink a little water, pray
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
[ גָּמָא ] vb. swallow (liquids)
— 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.
גַּמָּא
- (Γάμμα)
- 1. Gamma, the third letter of the Greek alphabet. Shek. III, 2 אלפא ביתא ג׳ Ms. O. (ed. גמלא).
- 2. the shape of a Gamma, Γ, v. preced.
גָּמָא
- (b. h.), גָּמָה, גָּמַע to take a draught, quaff; to sip, suck up. Y. Maas. Sh. II, beg. 53ᵇ he melted fat וגְמָעוֹ and sipped it; Y. Yoma VIII, 45ᵃ top וגְמָייוֹ. Sabb. XIV, 4 (111ᵃ) לא יִגְמָא בהן וכ׳ Ar. (ed. יִגְמַע, or יגַמּ׳ Pi., v. infra) he must not quaff vinegar through his teeth. Y. Maasr. III, 50ᵈ bot. כמה … לִגְמוֹת בכוס how large a portion of the cup one must quaff at a time. Y. Shebi. II, end, 34ᵇ; Y. Ned. VII, beg. 40ᵇ the leaves of the colocasia must not be used (in case of a vow of abstinence from vegetables, or in the Sabbath year) לגמות וכ׳ to sip water out of them (v. Sm. Ant. s. v. Colocasia); a. fr.
- same. Sabb. 111ᵃ מְגַמֵּעַ ופולט תנן (Ms. M. לא יִגְמַע ויפלוט) the Mishnah means, he must not quaff and spit out; Bets. 18ᵇ; Y. Shebi. VIII, 38ᵃ top מְגַמֵּא; 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 2 distinct written forms H1572 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַגְמִיאִ֥י/נִי | Verb, Hiphil, Imperative, 2nd Person, Feminine, Singular | Genesis 24:17 | 1 |
| יְגַמֶּא | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 39:24 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1572, 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 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.
