חַכָּה
hook
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2443 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
Job 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Habakkuk 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.
חכה — transliterated chakkâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “hook.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Job (33% of all occurrences). It first appears in Job 41:1. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2443 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 33%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: All of them with the angle 1×, Angle 1×, Hook 1×
- American Standard Version†: All of them with the angle 1×, Angle 1×, Fishhook 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Hook 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Hook 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2443 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2443 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2443 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2443 across 3† tagged occurrences — 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.
- hook, angle, hook fastened in jaw, fish hook
Word origin
n.f. hook fastened in jaw, fish-hook (NH id., Aramaic חַכְּתָא)—abs. ח׳ Jb 40:25 + 2 times;—כָּל־מַשְׁלִיכֵי בַיְאֹר חַכָּ֑ה Is 19:8 (‖ הַדַּיָּגִים), כֻּלֹּה בְּחַכָּה הֵעֲלָה Hb 1:15 (of אדם, who, v 14, is comp. to דְּגֵי הַיָּם, and רֶמֶשׂ), cf. תִּמְשֹׁךְ לִוְיָתָן בְּחַכָּ֑ה Jb 40:25.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חכה (châkâh) (H2442) — to wait.
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.
חָכָה
- , v. חכי
חַכָּה
- hook, fish-hook. Y. Pes. IV, 30ᵈ top. M. Kat. 25ᵇ בנחל … נפלה ח׳ וכ׳ if the fish-hook is thrown into the rapid river (to catch the fish), what can the waters in the pond do (if the great die, what can common humanity expect)?—Erub. 19ᵃ מטילין לו ח׳ וכ׳ they put a hook into the convict’s mouth &c.; a. e.—Pl. חַכִּין. Tosef. B. Kam. VIII, 17. Sifré Num. s. 44 גררום בחַכֵּי ברזל they dragged them out of the sanctuary with iron hooks (on shafts, v. בַּקְלוֹסָא); Yalk. ib. 712 בקני (corr. acc.); Sifra Sh’mini, introd. חנית של ברזל (read: חַכִּים). Tosef. B. Kam. XI, 13 שלש חכין (Var. חוטין, כופין) three fuller’s hooks (for stretching clothes; v. חוֹב II, 2).
חכי
- (b. h.), Pi. חִכָּה
- 1. (denom. of חַכָּה) to insert a hook, to fish with the angle, to fasten. Y. Sabb. IV, end, 7ᶜ אם לחַכּוֹת בו if it is a sûgar (v. סוּגַר) with which to fasten a dog (by inserting the hook of a chain), opp. בשביל שלא לאכול one intended to prevent from eating (a muzzle); Y. Bets. II, end, 61ᵈ (not להכות). B. Kam. 81ᵃ ומְחַכִּין בימה וכ׳ and that people be free to fish with the angle in the lake of Tiberias.
- 2. (b. h.) to lie in wait (v. Hos. VI, 9); to wait for, hope, be anxious for (with ל). Snh. 97ᵇ (fr. Hab. II, 3) הַכֵּה לו wait for it (the redemption); ib. אנו מְחַכִּין והוא אינו מְחַכֶּה we are anxious, but He is not (ref. to Is. XXX, 18). Pesik. R. s. 34; Yalk. Zeph. 567; a. e. [Yalk. Lev. 604 מחכה, v. הָקָה.] e.g. Hosea 6:9
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 3 distinct written forms H2443 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/חַכָּ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 41:1 | 1 |
| בְּ/חַכָּ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Habakkuk 1:15 | 1 |
| חַכָּ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 19:8 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
