חָרַק
to gnash
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H2786 appears in the Book of Lamentations — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Lamentations
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.
חרק — transliterated châraq — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to gnash.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. More than half of its appearances fall in Psalms. It first appears in Job 16:9. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2786 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 3 verses 60%
- Job 1 verse 20%
- Lamentations 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 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: Gnash 1×, Gnasheth 1×, He gnasheth 1×
- American Standard Version: Be grieved he shall gnash 1×, Gnasheth 1×, Me 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gnash 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gnash 1×, He gnashes 1×, He will grind 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2786 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2786 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2786 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2786 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 1 sense 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. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Pf. 3 ms. ח׳ Jb 16:9; Impf. יַחֲרֹק ψ 112:10; וַיַּחַרְקוּ־ La 2:16; Inf. abs. חָרֹק ψ 35:16; Pt. חֹרֵק ψ 37:12;—grind the teeth in rage against: ח׳ שׁניו על ψ 37:12; 35:16; abs. without על 112:10 La 2:16 (only here c. שֵׁן sing.); c. בְּ instr. (Ges§ 119. 3 b. R. DaSynt. § 73 R. 6) ח׳ בשׁניו על־ Jb 16:9. e.g. Job 16:9
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
vb. gnash or grind the teeth, only poet. (NH id.; Arabic حَرَقَ file, rub together, grate or grind (teeth); Aramaic ܚܰܪܶܩ id.)—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
חֵרֶק
- (next w.) [cleft,] ḥerek, a phonetic substitute for ḥerem (חֵרֶם). Ned. I, 2.—Pl. חֲרָקִים, v. חֲרָקַיָּיא.
חָרַק
- (b. h.) to cut a gap; to squeeze into a gap; to prick. Part. pass. חָרוּק, f. חֲרוּקָה; pl. חֲרוּקִים, חֲרוּקוֹת a) having incisions, edged, serried. Ḥull. 59ᵇ ed., v. חָדַק.—b) wedged in. Par. XII, 8 החרוקות (Var. החֲדוּקוֹת) those handles which are squeezed into holes, opp. הקדוחות bored handles; Tosef. ib. XII (XI), 17 אף הרוק וצואה וכ׳ (read: אף החרוקות · צואה וכ׳).
- [to set at edge,] (with שֵׁן) to gnash, grind the teeth. Pesik. R. s. 37 מְחָרְקִין שיניהם ground their teeth (in sneer). Ex. R. s. 5; Tanḥ. Vaëra 6 התחיל מְחָרֵק עליהם וכ׳ he began to gnash his teeth against them (in rage).
חֲרַק
- Sabb. 67ᵃ לִיחֲרוֹק ביה פורתא let him cut a little notch into it. Part. חָרֵיק. Y. Kil. IX, 32ᶜ bot. וח׳ בשינוי and gnashing his teeth; Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵇ וחרוק (corr. acc.).
- same. Y. Kil. l. c. הויתא א׳ בשינייך thou wast gnashing thy teeth; Y. Keth. l. c. הוות א׳ בשינוי (corr. acc.).
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 5 distinct written forms H2786 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/חֹרֵ֖ק | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 37:12 | 1 |
| וַ/יַּֽחַרְקוּ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Lamentations 2:16 | 1 |
| חָרַ֣ק | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 16:9 | 1 |
| חָרֹ֖ק | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Absolute | Psalms 35:16 | 1 |
| יַחֲרֹ֣ק | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 112:10 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
