גֹּ֫מֶא
reed
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
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1573 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 2 distinct verses. 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
- Isaiah 18:2 גֹמֶא֮ n c ms that sends ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of papyrus on the waters, [saying], Go, you swift messengers, to a nation tall and smooth, to a people awesome from their beginning onward, a nation that measures out and treads down, whose land the rivers divide!
- Isaiah 35:7 וָ/גֹֽמֶא conj + n c ms The glowing sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water: in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.
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 noun גמא centers on the idea of “reed.” It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 2 of 4 verses. First canonically at Exodus 2:3, it enters the text early. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1573 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 50%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 25%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Bulrushes 2×
- American Standard Version: Bulrushes 1×, Can the rush 1×, Papyrus 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Papyrus 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Papyrus 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1573 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H1573 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1573 across 4 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1573 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- rush, reed, papyrus
Word origin
n.m. Jb 8:11 rush, reed, papyrus (cf. Löw p. 55) (NH גּוֹמֶא, Ethiopic ጎሜዕ loan-word, according to Di;—name from swallowing, sucking up, water? so Thes, cf. Che Is 18:2 al.; = Copt. gome, v. Di Ex 2:3 whence others der. as loan-word)—גֹּ֫מֶא Ex 2:3 + 3 times;—rush, paper-reed, (Egyptian) Jb 8:11 (‖ אָחוּ; coll. Is 35:7 (‖ קָנֶה); as material, תֵּבַת ג׳ Ex 2:3 chest of paper-reed; כְּלֵי־ג׳ Is 18:2 vessels of paper-reed.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from גמא (gâmâʼ) (H1572) — to swallow.
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 4 distinct written forms H1573 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| גֹמֶא֮ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 18:2 | 1 |
| גֹּ֔מֶא | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 2:3 | 1 |
| גֹּ֭מֶא | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 8:11 | 1 |
| וָ/גֹֽמֶא | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 35:7 | 1 |
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.
