חֲשׁוֹךְ
darkness
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Every verse where H2816 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Daniel 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.
חשוך — transliterated chăshôwk — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “darkness.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. A true hapax — its single appearance is Daniel 2:22. It shares a root with חשך, חשך and חשך. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2816 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.
- #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
- Daniel 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Is in the darkness 1×
- American Standard Version: Is in the darkness 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lies in darkness 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Is in the darkness 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2816 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2816 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2816 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2816 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.
- darkness
Word origin
[ חֲשׁוֹךְ ] n.[m.] darkness;—emph. Dn 2:22.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חשך (châshak) (H2821) — to be dark.
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.
חָשׁוּךְ
- 1. dark, black. Ab. Zar. 8ᵃ, v. חָשַׁךְ.—Pl. חֲשׁוּכִּים, כִּין …; f. חֲשׁוּכּוֹת. Bekh. VII, 5 (expl. מרוח אשך, Lev. XXI, 20) שמראיו ח׳ whose complexion is very dark. Yalk. Ex. 258 פנים ח׳ dark (frowning) countenance; Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 2 חֲשֵׁכוֹת. e.g. Leviticus 21:20
- 2. obscured, benighted. Pesik. R. s. 6, beg. (ref. to Prov. XXII, 29) פרעה הח׳ Pharaoh, the benighted.—Pl. as ab. Cant. R. to I, 1 (ref. to Prov. l. c.) לפני ח׳ אלו הרשעים ‘before the benighted’ that means the wicked. e.g. Proverbs 22:29
חֲשׁוֹךְ
- ch.
- 1. same, dark. Targ. Am. V, 20.
- 2. (חֲשַׁךְ II) lean, reduced, poor. v. חֲשִׁיךְ II.
חֲשׁוֹךְ ²
- (preced.)
- 1. darkness. Targ. Ex. X, 21, sq.; a. fr.—Targ. Ez. XIII, 18, v. רְקִיעָא II.—Pes. 34ᵇ ארעא דח׳ a land of darkness (fogs). Ḥag. 12ᵇ bot. ומי איכא ח׳ וכ׳ is there darkness before the Lord?; a. fr.—Pl. חֲשׁוֹכַיָּא. Targ. Ps. LXXXVIII, 7.
- 2. charred wick, snuff. Bets. 32ᵃ עדויי ח׳ Ar. (ed. חוּשְׁכָּא). v. מָחַט.
חֲשַׁךְ
- Targ. Job. XVIII, 6. Targ. Ex. X, 15; a. fr.—Taan. 10ᵃ חֲשׁוּךְ ענני וכ׳ when the clouds are dark, they contain much water.
- 1. to darken, obscure. Targ. Ps. CV, 28; a. e.
- 2. to do something at night, to be late. Tam. 27ᵇ חַשֵּׁיךְ תקין נפשך וכ׳ at bed-time attend to thy body, and in the morning etc. Ber. 8ᵃ מקדמי ומְחַשְּׁכֵי וכ׳ they go to Synagogue early and late. Ib. קדימו וחַשִּׁיכוּ ועיילו וכ׳ (Ms. M. ואַחְשִׁיכוּ, Af., v. Rabb. D. S. a. l.) go ye early and late to etc. Targ. Y. Deut. XXVIII, 65, v. מַחַשְׁכָן.
- 1. to obscure. Targ. Job XXXVIII, 2; a. e.
- 2. to do something late. Targ. I Sam. XVII, 16.—Ber. l. c., v. supra.
- to grow dark. Targ. Ps. LXIX, 24; a. e.—Snh. 96ᵃ עד דאתא איח׳ by the time he came it had grown dark.
חֲשַׁךְ ²
- (cmp. חסך) to be reduced, lean. Targ. Ps. XXXI, 11 (h. text עששו, v. Rashi a. l.)
- same. Targ. Job XXXIII, 21 Ms. (ed. שפיין).
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 H2816, 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
- חשך chôshek H2822 darkness
- חשך châshôk H2823 obscure
- חשכה cheshkâh H2824 darkness
- חשכה chăshêkâh H2825 darkness
- מחשך machshâk H4285 darkness
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 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.
