חֵ֫דֶק
thorn
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 H2312 appears — 2 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.
Proverbs 1 verse
Micah 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.
At its core, חדק (chêdeq) means “thorn.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. The word gravitates to Proverbs (50%), then Micah. It first appears in Proverbs 15:19. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2312 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Is as a brier 1×, Thorns 1×
- American Standard Version: Is as a brier 1×, Thorns 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Like a brier 1×, Thorns 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Briar 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2312 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2312 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2312 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2312 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- brier, thorn, prick
Word origin
n.[m.] brier (NH id.; Aramaic חִדְקָא Löwp. 147, No. 104; cf. Arabic حَدَقٌ a kind of nightshare, v. Lane532);—טוֹבָם כְּחֵדֶק Mi 7:4 the best of them (si vera l.) is like the brier (‖ יָשָׁר מִמְּסוּכָה); דֶּרֶךְ עָצֵל כִּמְשֻׂכַת חָ֑דֶק Pr 15:19 the way of a sluggard is like a brier-hedge.
— 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 sting
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.
חָדַק
- to cut into, prick.—Part. pass. חָדוּק, fem. חֲדוּקָה, pl. חֲדוּקוֹת. Ḥull. 59ᵇ ח׳ בעינן Ar. the horns must be prickly (rough); ed. חרוקות, v. חָרַק.
- to squeeze into, drive in. Erub. 101ᵃ (play on חדק, Mic. VII, 4, a. והדקות, ib. IV, 13) שמְחַדְּקִין אוה"ע וכ׳ Ms. M. (ed. שמְהַ׳ את הרשעים) those who force the nations into Gehenna; Yalk. Mic. 556. Y. Sabb. X, end, 12ᵈ להַדֵּיק בה וכ׳ to close with it (to stuff it into) defective bags. e.g. Micah 7:4
- to be driven into, to stick to. Tanḥ. Ki Thissa 1; Pesik. R. s. 10, beg. (ref. to Prov. XV, 19) as the thorn מִתְחַדֶּקֶת בבגדיו וכ׳ sticks to the garments &c. e.g. Proverbs 15:19
חֲדַק
- Part. חָדֵיק pricking, injuring (by being forced into). Sabb. 78ᵇ כיון דח׳ במנא Ms. M. because a rope injures a vessel by being forced into a hole (ed. חריק, v. חֲרַק).
- to force into, to fill a gap. Yoma 72ᵃ חדְּקִינְהוּ fasten them by forcing the chords through the rings. Sabb. 125ᵇ כיון דחַדְּקָהּ Ms. M. (ed. דהַ׳) since he squeezed the stone in (made it immovable).
חֶדֶק
- (preced.)
- 1. thorn. Erub. 101ᵃ it is written about you (Jews) טובם כח׳ (Mic. VII, 4) the best among them is like a thorn. e.g. Micah 7:4
- 2. anything used for filling a gap, stop-gap.—Pl. חֲדָקִים, חֲדָקִין, הֲ׳. Ib. כשם שח׳ וכ׳ (Ms. O. שה׳) as the stop-gaps protect the breach &c.—Ib. X, 8 (101ᵃ) וח׳ שבפרצה (Bab. ed. חוֹדְקִים, Ms. M. הדקין, Var. חרקין, חורקין, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) and the stop-gaps in a breach.
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 H2312 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חָ֑דֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 15:19 | 1 |
| כְּ/חֵ֔דֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Micah 7:4 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
