חֵ֫קֶר
search
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 7 times (58%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 4 times (33%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 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 12 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2714 appears — 12 distinct verses across 5 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.
Judges 1 verse
Job 7 verses
- Job 5:9 חֵ֑קֶר n c ms Who does great things that can't be fathomed, Marvelous things without number;
- Job 8:8 לְ/חֵ֣קֶר prep + n c ms cs "Please inquire of past generations, Find out about the learning of their fathers.
- Job 9:10 חֵ֑קֶר n c ms Who does great things past finding out, Yes, marvelous things without number.
- Job 11:7 הַ/חֵ֣קֶר ptcl inter + n c ms cs "Can you fathom the mystery of God? Or can you probe the limits of the Almighty?
- Job 34:24 חֵ֑קֶר n c ms He breaks in pieces mighty men in ways past finding out, And sets others in their place.
- Job 36:26 חֵֽקֶר n c ms Behold, God is great, and we don't know him. The number of his years is unsearchable.
- Job 38:16 וּ/בְ/חֵ֥קֶר conj + prep + n c ms cs "Have you entered into the springs of the sea? Or have you walked in the recesses of the deep?
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 2 verses
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.
חקר — transliterated chêqer — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “search.” More than half of its appearances fall in Job. It appears 12 verses across 5 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Its earliest occurrence is Judges 5:16. It shares a root with חקר and מחקר. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2714 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 12 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 12 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 10 verses · 83%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 17%
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 unsearchable 2×
- American Standard Version: Is unsearchable 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Searching out 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Searching 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2714 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2714 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2714 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2714 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 renderings that appear 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.
- a search, investigation, searching, enquiry, thing to be searched out
Word origin
n.m. Ju 5:16 searching, thing (to be) searched out;—abs. הֵ֫קֶר Jb 5:9 + 8 times; cstr. id. Pr 25:27 + 2 times; pl. cstr. חִקְרֵי Ju 5:16;—חִקְרֵי לֵב Ju 5:16 searchings, questionings of heart; Jb 11:7 canst thou reach ח׳ אֱלוֹהַּ i.e. what is to be explored in him, the whole range of his nature, so ח׳ תהום 38:16 the range of the deep; especially אֵין ח׳ i.e. it is unsearchable Jb 5:9; 9:10 ψ 145:3 Pr 25:3 Is 40:28, cf. לא ח׳ Jb 34:24; 36:26; ח׳ אבותם 8:8 i.e. thing searched out by their fathers.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חקר (châqar) (H2713) — to search.
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.
חָקַר
- (b. h.) to go around, to espy, to examine; esp. to cross-examine, v. חֲקִירָה. Ab. I, 9 הוי מרבה לַחְקוֹר וכ׳ cross-examine witnesses as much as possible. Snh. 40ᵇ מדהוי ליה … חָקוֹר תַּחְקוֹר the text might have read (for emphasis) thou shalt diligently inquire, or thou shalt diligently investigate (instead of the unusual phrase ודרשת היטב, Deut. XVII, 4); a. e. e.g. Deuteronomy 17:4
- to be investigated, examined. Koh. R. to I, 16 הלב נ׳ the heart is examined (by the Lord). R. Hash. III, 1 נֶחְקְרוּ העדים when the evidence was closed. Tosef. Snh. VI, 4 עד שתֵּחָקֵר עדותן וכ׳ until their examination in court has been closed; נֶחְקְרָה עדותן וכ׳ after it has been closed, they cannot retract. Ib. 5; a. fr.
חֲקַר
- Targ. II Sam. X, 3. Targ. Ps. CXXXIX, 23; a. e.
חֵקֶר
- preced.) search.—אין (להם) ח׳ unsearchable, innumerable. Num. R. s. 19; Tanḥ. Ḥuck. 20.
חָקָר
- , constr. חָקַר m. (preced. wds.) examiner. Targ. Jer. XVII, 10.
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 8 distinct written forms H2714 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חֵ֑קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 5:9 | 3 |
| חֵֽקֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 36:26 | 3 |
| הַ/חֵ֣קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Job 11:7 | 1 |
| וְ/חֵ֖קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 25:27 | 1 |
| וּ/בְ/חֵ֥קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Job 38:16 | 1 |
| חִקְרֵי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Judges 5:16 | 1 |
| חֵ֖קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 40:28 | 1 |
| לְ/חֵ֣קֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Job 8:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2714, 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 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 12 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.
