חֲשֵׁכָה
darkness
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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2825 appears — 5 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Psalms 2 verses
- Psalms 82:5 בַּ/חֲשֵׁכָ֥ה prep + n c fs They don't know, neither do they understand. They walk back and forth in darkness. All the foundations of the earth are shaken.
- Psalms 139:12 כַּ֝/חֲשֵׁיכָ֗ה prep + n c fs Even the darkness doesn't hide from you, But the night shines as the day. The darkness is like light to you.
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 8:22 וַ/חֲשֵׁכָה֙ conj + n c fs and they shall look to the earth, and see, distress and darkness, the gloom of anguish; and into thick darkness [they shall be] driven away.
- Isaiah 50:10 חֲשֵׁכִ֗ים n c fp Who is among you who fears Yahweh, who obeys the voice of his servant? He who walks in darkness, and has no light, let him trust in the name of Yahweh, and rely on his God.
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.
חשכה — transliterated chăshêkâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “darkness.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Psalms (40% of all occurrences). Debuting at Genesis 15:12, it then recurs through the corpus. Sharing its root, it stands alongside חשך, חשוך and חשך. 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 H2825 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 →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 40%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
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: Darkness 5×
- American Standard Version: Darkness 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Darkness 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Darkness 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2825 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2825 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H2825 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2825 across 6 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.
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
n.f. darkness (chiefly poet.)—ח׳ Gn 15:12 + 2 times, so read also prob. Mi 3:6 (for MT חָֽשְׁכָה); חֲשֵׁיכָה ψ 139:12; cstr. חֶשְׁכַּת ψ 18:12; pl. חֲשֵׁכִים Is 50:10;—darkness, opp. light (אוֹרָה) ψ 139:12; supernat., ח׳ גדולה Gn 15:12 (JE); חֶשְׁכַּת־מַיִם ψ 18:12 in theoph. (but ‖ 2 S 22:12 חַשְׁרַת־מים a mass of water); fig. = lack of understanding ψ 82:5; = distress Is 8:22 (‖ צָרָה), 50:10.
— 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.
חֲשֵׁכָה
- , v. חֲשֵׁיכָה
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 H2825 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּ/חֲשֵׁכָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 82:5 | 1 |
| וַ/חֲשֵׁכָה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 8:22 | 1 |
| חֲשֵׁכִ֗ים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 50:10 | 1 |
| חֲשֵׁכָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 15:12 | 1 |
| כַּ֝/חֲשֵׁיכָ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 139:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2825, 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
- חשוך chăshôwk H2816 darkness
- חשך chôshek H2822 darkness
- חשך châshôk H2823 obscure
- חשכה cheshkâh H2824 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 5 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.
