גָּשַׁשׁ
to grope
‘to grope’ 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H1659 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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 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.
גשש (gâshash) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to grope.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Isaiah 59:10. It is not a single-sense word — see its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1659 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.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 1 verse 100%
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 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: We grope 2×
- American Standard Version: We grope 1×, Yea 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Groping 1×, We feel our way along 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: We grope 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1659 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1659 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1659 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1659 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
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 1 sense 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
- . Is 59:10 grope, grope for e.g. Isaiah 59:10
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
[ גשׁשׁ ] vb. feel with the hand, feel, stroke
— 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.
גָּשַׁשׁ
- v. גּוּשׁ) to touch a substance, to strike against. Ḥall. II, 2; Y. ib. 58ᶜ top הספינה גוֹשֶׁשֶׁת the ship touches the ground (in harbor).
- to feel, grope. Y. Yoma V, 42ᶜ היה מְגַשֵּׁשׁ וכ׳ entered groping &c.
- (cmp. קשקש, כשכש) to beat, ring. Lev. R. s. 8 (ref. to Jud. XIII, 25, cmp. פַּעֲמֹן) התחיל רוה"ק לגַשְׁגֵּשׁ וכ׳ the holy spirit began to ring in Samson. e.g. Judges 13:25
- , Hithpol. הִתְגּוֹשֵׁשׁ, Hithpalp. הִתְגַּשְׁגֵּשׁ, Nithpa. נִתְגַּשֵּׁשׁ
- 1. to wrestle, fight. Gen. R. s. 22; s. 77; Cant. R. to III, 6. Ex. R. s. 28, beg.
- 2. to exercise one’s strength, practice. Pesik. S’liḥoth. p. 166ᵃ גבור שהוא מִתְגּוֹשֵׁש וכ׳ a warrior practicing on a stone-cutter’s stone.
גְּשַׁשׁ
- Pa. גַּשֵּׁשׁ same, to feel, touch. Targ. Y. Gen. XXVII, 12; 22 (h. text מוש). Gitt. 67ᵇ bot. גַּשְּׁשֵׁיה he (being blind) touched it (and felt the bone).
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 H1659 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נְגַֽשְׁשָׁ֤ה | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 59:10 | 1 |
| נְגַשֵּׁ֑שָׁה | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 59:10 | 1 |
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.
