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חָוָח

rock

H2337 Strong's Hebrew
châvâch Transliteration
/khaw-vawkh'/ 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.

“rock” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חוח (châvâch). It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in 1 Samuel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. A true hapax — its single appearance is 1 Samuel 13:6. From the same root come חוח and חח. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
thicket
Modern gloss
rock
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H2337 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.
1 Samuel 13:6
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in 1 Samuel 13:6.
#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 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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: Thickets 1×
  • American Standard Version: Thickets 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Thickets 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2337 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Thickets” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H2337 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Thickets” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H2337 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Thickets” 1×

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 3 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.

  • 1.
    • a. brier, bramble 2 K 14:9(×2) = 2 Ch 25:18(×2) (allegory of Jehoash); coll., sign of desolation Ho 9:6 (‖ קִמּוֹשׁ), Is 34:13 (‖ קִמּוֹשׁ, סִירִים), Jb 31:40 (opp. חִטִּים); in sim. of fool’s parable ח׳ עָלָה בְּיַד־שִׁכּוֹר Pr 26:9 a brier cometh into the hand of a drunken man (De Now Str); כְּשׁוֹשַׁנָּה בֵּין הַחוֹחִים Ct 2:2; briers = thickets as hiding-places 1 S 13:6 (but Ew We Dr חוֹרִים holes, cf. 14:11; v. sub iii. חרר; ‖ מְעָרוֹת, סְלָעִים, צְרִחִים, בֹּרוֹת; 𝔊 here ἐν τ. μάνδραις; 14:11 ἐκ τ. τρωγλῶν). e.g. 2 Kings 14:9
  • 2. late,
    • a. hook or ring, in jaw of crocodile c. תִּקֹּב Jb 40:26 (‖ הֲתָשִׂים אַגְמֹן בְּאַפּוֹ); of captive וַיִּלְכְּדוּ אֶת־מְנַשֶּׁה בַּחֹחִים 2 Ch 33:11 (cf. חַח). e.g. Job 40:26

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

n.m. 2 K 14:9 1. brier, bramble. 2. hook, ring, fetter;—ח׳ abs. Ho 9:6 + 8 times; pl. חֲוָחִים 1 S 13:6 (but v. infr.), חוֹחִים Ct 2:2; חֹחִים 2 Ch 33:11;—

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from חוח (chôwach) (H2336) — thorn.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 620a ?


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.

חוֹחַ

  • (b. h.; = חוחו, v. חָוָה) thorn. B. Kam. 16ᵃ, v. next w.

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 H2337, 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.

Derives from

Shares the same root

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).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.