וָו
hook
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 12 times (92%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (8%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 13 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2053 appears — 13 distinct verses 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.
Exodus 13 verses
- Exodus 26:32 וָוֵי/הֶ֖ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp You shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold; their hooks shall be of gold, on four sockets of silver.
- Exodus 26:37 וָוֵי/הֶ֖ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp You shall make for the screen five pillars of acacia, and overlay them with gold: their hooks shall be of gold: and you shall cast five sockets of brass for them.
- Exodus 27:10 וָוֵ֧י n c mp cs and the pillars of it shall be twenty, and their sockets twenty, of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets shall be of silver.
- Exodus 27:11 וָוֵ֧י n c mp cs Likewise for the north side in length there shall be hangings one hundred cubits long, and the pillars of it twenty, and their sockets twenty, of brass; the hooks of the pillars, and their fillets, of silver.
- Exodus 27:17 וָוֵי/הֶ֖ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp All the pillars of the court round about shall be filleted with silver; their hooks of silver, and their sockets of brass.
- Exodus 36:36 וָוֵי/הֶ֖ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp He made four pillars of acacia for it, and overlaid them with gold. Their hooks were of gold. He cast four sockets of silver for them.
- Exodus 36:38 וָ֣וֵי/הֶ֔ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp and the five pillars of it with their hooks. He overlaid their capitals and their fillets with gold, and their five sockets were of brass.
- Exodus 38:10 וָוֵ֧י n c mp cs their pillars were twenty, and their sockets twenty, of brass; the hooks of the pillars and their fillets were of silver.
- Exodus 38:11 וָוֵ֧י n c mp cs For the north side one hundred cubits, their pillars twenty, and their sockets twenty, of brass; the hooks of the pillars, and their fillets, of silver.
- Exodus 38:12 וָוֵ֧י n c mp cs For the west side were hangings of fifty cubits, their pillars ten, and their sockets ten; the hooks of the pillars, and their fillets, of silver.
- Exodus 38:17 וָוֵ֨י n c mp cs The sockets for the pillars were of brass. The hooks of the pillars and their fillets were of silver; and the overlaying of their capitals, of silver; and all the pillars of the court were filleted with silver.
- Exodus 38:19 וָוֵי/הֶ֣ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp Their pillars were four, and their sockets four, of brass; their hooks of silver, and the overlaying of their capitals, and their fillets, of silver.
- Exodus 38:28 וָוִ֖ים n c mp Of the one thousand seven hundred seventy-five shekels he made hooks for the pillars, overlaid their capitals, and made fillets for them.
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.
וו (vâv) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “hook.” Exodus dominates its distribution — 13 of 13 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 13 verses — uncommon. It first appears in Exodus 26:32. Its English rendering has broadened — “hooks” classically, “hooks of” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2053 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 13 verses 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 13 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 13 verses · 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: Hooks 13×
- American Standard Version: Hooks 13×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hooks 13×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hooks of 7×, Hooks 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2053 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2053 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2053 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2053 across 14 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 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.
- hook, peg, nail, pin
Word origin
[ וָו ] n.[m.] hook, pin or peg
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: probably a hook (the name of the sixth heb. letter)
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.
וָו
- 1. (b. h.) hook.—Pl. יָוִים. Ex. R. s. 51; a. fr.
- 2. the letter Vav.—Pl. וָוִים, וָוִין; v. וא"ו.
וָו ²
- —Pl. וָוִין, וָוַיָּא. Targ. Ex. XXXVIII, 28. Ib. XXVII, 10; a. fr.
ווּ־
- = וְהוּ. Y. Snh. X, 29ᵇ top ווא"ל and he said to him.
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 6 distinct written forms H2053 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וָוֵ֧י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 27:10 | 5 |
| וָוֵי/הֶ֖ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 26:32 | 4 |
| וָ֣וֵי/הֶ֔ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 36:38 | 1 |
| וָוִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 38:28 | 1 |
| וָוֵ֨י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 38:17 | 1 |
| וָוֵי/הֶ֣ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 38:19 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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.
