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גָּשַׁם

to rain

‘to rain’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

H1652 Strong's Hebrew
gâsham Transliteration
/gaw-sham'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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.

“to rain” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb גשם (gâsham). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Jeremiah 14:22. Read the stem: it spans 2 stems, including Pual and Hiphil. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
rain
Modern gloss
to rain
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H1652 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Jeremiah 14:22
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Jeremiah 14:22.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 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 1 distinct verse.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Can cause rain 1×
  • American Standard Version: Can cause rain 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Bring rain 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Can bring rain 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H1652 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Can cause rain” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H1652 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Can cause rain” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H1652 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Bring rain” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H1652 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Can bring rain” 1×

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. This entry also uses Pual (the passive of Piel).

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.

Pual

  • . be rained upon

Hiphil

  • . cause or send rain

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

Origin: a primitive root

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 389


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.

גָּשַׁם

  • v. גּוּשׁ) to make the earth cloddy (v. Ges. H. Dict.10 s. v.).—Part. pass. גָּשׁוּם cloddy in consequence of ample rains. Y. Yoma V, 42ᶜ top שנת גְּשׁוּמָה שחונה וכ׳ (sub. ארץ) a year in which the earth forms clods, then is parched so as to form scabs, and then moistened with dew; Bab. ib. 53ᵇ שנת שחונה שנת ג׳ Ms. M. (ed. שנה ג׳ ושח׳, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note), expl. אם שח׳ (היא) תהא ג׳ if it is to be parched, let it first be soaked with heavy rains; Lev. R. s. 20; Tanḥ. Aḥăré 3 (corr. acc.); ed. Bub. ib. 4.
    • (denom. of גֶּשֶׁם) to be frought with rain, rain-bringing. B. Bath. 25ᵇ since the destruction of the Temple לא הוּגְשְׁמָה וכ׳ the south wind has not been rain-bringing.

גֶּשֶׁם I

  • preced.) heavy, continuous rain. Taan. 3ᵇ לא אמר מוריד הַגָּ׳ if he failed to insert in the second benediction (v. גְּבוּרָה) ‘Who sendeth rain’.—Pl. גְּשָׁמִים. Taan. I, 1, a. fr. גבורות ג׳, v. גְּבוּרָה. Ib. 2 שואלין את הג׳ we insert the petition for rain in the ninth benediction, v. שַׁאֲלָה.—ימות הג׳ rainy season, autumn and winter. Ib. 3ᵇ. Toh. VI, 7, v. בִּקְעָה; a. v. fr.—שְׂדֵה גְ׳ (or sub. שדה) a field naturally watered by rain, opp. שלחין. Bekh. VI, 3 של ג׳ from fields with natural irrigation; cmp. בַּעַל. [In later Hebr. literature גֶּשֶׁם substance, v. next w.].

גֶּשֶׁם II

  • (גשם, v. גּוּשְׁמָא) body, self. Dan. IV, 30.—Pl. גִּשְׁמַיָּא. Lam. R. to I, 5 לא יהבין גִּשְׁמֵיהוֹן (Koh. R. to VII, 11 גרמיהון) they will not devote themselves to warfare. e.g. Daniel 4:30

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.


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1652, 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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).

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