גַּף
body
‘body’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 3 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1610 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 21:3 בְּ/גַפּ֥/וֹ בְּ/גַפּ֣/וֹ prep + n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms prep + n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he is married, then his wife shall go out with him.
- Exodus 21:4 בְ/גַפּֽ/וֹ prep + n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master's, and he shall go out by himself.
Proverbs 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.
“body” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun גף (gaph). It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Exodus, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Exodus 21:3. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1610 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.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 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) 2 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 33%
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: Himself 3×
- American Standard Version: Himself 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: not separately translated
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Himself 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1610 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1610 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Does not render H1610 with a distinct English word (not separately translated in its 3 tagged occurrences).
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1610 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.
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.
- body, self (only in phrase, eg by himself)
- height, elevation
Word origin
[ גַּף ] n.m. body, self, height, elevation
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to arch
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.
גַּף I
- , v. גּוּף) body. בְּגַפּוֹ alone; explained Kidd. 20ᵃ בגופו נכנס בגופו יצא he came with his body, and so he shall go out, i.e. he has no claim for injuries received during servitude; oth. expl. יחידי נכנס וכ׳ if he entered a single man, he must leave a single man, i.e. his master has no right to give him a Canaanite slave for propagating purposes.
גַּף II
- c. (גנף, cmp. כָּנָף a. כַּף; v. אֲגַף) [bent, joint,]
- 1. the long portion of the wing. Zeb. VII, 5 שיבש גַּפָּהּ (Talm. ed. 68ᵇ שיבשה, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l.) whose wing is withered. Ḥull. 57ᵃ שמוטת גף a bird whose wing is dislocated.—Du. גַּפַּיִּם, גַּפַּיִּים. Ib. III, 4 נשתברו גַּפֶּיהָ whose wings are broken, contrad. to כנפ׳ wing feathers.
- 2. arms, shoulders of a human being. Ohol. VII, 4 ניטלת בג׳ carried by her arms (put around the necks of her supporters); v. אֲגַף.
- 3. handles of a vessel, sides &c. Kel. VIII, 3. Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. X, 5; a. e.—V. גֵּיף.
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 H1610 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְ/גַפּֽ/וֹ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Exodus 21:4 | 1 |
| בְּ/גַפּ֣/וֹ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Exodus 21:3 | 1 |
| בְּ/גַפּ֥/וֹ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Exodus 21:3 | 1 |
| גַּ֝פֵּ֗י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Proverbs 9:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1610, 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 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.
