חֲשַׁשׁ
chaff
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2842 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 5:24 וַ/חֲשַׁ֤שׁ conj + n c ms Therefore as the tongue of fire devours the stubble, And as the dry grass sinks down in the flame, So their root shall be as rottenness, And their blossom shall go up as dust; Because they have rejected the law of Yahweh of Hosts, And despised the word of the Holy One of Israel.
- Isaiah 33:11 חֲשַׁ֖שׁ n c ms You shall conceive chaff, you shall bring forth stubble: your breath is a fire that shall devour you.
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.
חשש (châshash) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “chaff.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Isaiah, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. It first appears in Isaiah 5:24. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2842 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 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: Chaff 2×
- American Standard Version: Chaff 1×, Dry grass 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Chaff 1×, Dry grass 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chaff 1×, Dry grass 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2842 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2842 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2842 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2842 across 2 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.
- chaff, dry grass
Word origin
n.m. Is 5:24 chaff;—abs. תַּהֲרוּ ח׳ תִלְדוּ קַשׁ Is 33:11 ye conceive chaff, ye bring forth stubble (fig. of vain attempt of Assyrian); cstr. ח׳ לֶהָבָה יִרְפֶּח Is 5:24 (‖ קַשׁ) as flaming chaff sinketh down (sim. of perishing of heedless Judahites).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קש (qash) (H7179) — stubble.
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.
חָשַׁשׁ
- (v. חוּשׁ)
- 1. to feel heavy, feel pain. Y. Sabb. IV, 8ᶜ top החוֹשֵׁשׁ אזנו he who has ear-ache. Esth. R. to I, 1 (play on אח̇ש̇ור̇וש) who ever thinks of him ח̇וֹשֵֹׁשׁ את ר̇אש̇ו gets a head-ache; a. e.—(Mostly with ב). Cant. R. to V, 2 אם חושש … בראשו if one of the twins has a head-ache; a. fr.
- 2. to apprehend, take into consideration. Pes. I, 2 אין חוֹשְׁשִׁין שמא וכ׳ we do not take into consideration that perhaps a weasel &c. Tosef. Ḥull. III, 24 ואין ח׳ שמא של וכ׳ and we need not hesitate to use them for fear that they may be eggs of &c.; Ḥull. 63ᵇ אין ח׳ לא משום וכ׳. Sabb. XVI, 7; XXII, 3 חוֹשְׁשַׁנִי לו מחטאת I am afraid he has committed a sin which requires a sin-offering to atone for; a. fr.
חֲשַׁשׁ
- 1. to suffer. Y. M. Kat. III, 82ᵈ top פומיה הוא ח׳ he has an ailing on his mouth (and therefore ties it up). Cant. R. to II, 16 ועבד ח׳ וכ׳ and continued suffering with fever for three years; a. fr.
- 2. to be affected, troubled; to care, apprehend. Targ. Prov. XXVIII, 17 דחָשֵׁישׁ וכ׳ he who is troubled (feels compunction) about blood-guiltiness (h. text עשק); a. e.—Y. M. Kat. III, 81ᵈ bot. צריך את חשש על נפשך thou must mind the excommunication for thy soul’s sake. Ib. חַשׁ על נפשיה he minded the excommunication. Ib. וחַשּׁוּן אילין על אילין they minded each the other’s excommunication. Keth. 26ᵇ במֵיחַשׁ לזילותא וכ׳ they differ as to providing against the disregard of the court; a. fr. (interch. with חוּשׁ)—[
- 3. (= חֲשָׁא) to whisper, hiss. Targ. Jer. VI, 29 חַשׁ (ed. Wil. חֲשָׁא).]
- to become sick. Cant. R. l. c. אתח׳ ר׳ חנינא (Var. אִחֲ׳; ed. Wil. אתשש, corr. acc.).
- 1. to feel. Targ. Y. Num. XI, 12.
- 2. to care for. Targ. Ps. CXLI, 1 Regia (ed. חִישׁ).
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 2 distinct written forms H2842 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/חֲשַׁ֤שׁ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 5:24 | 1 |
| חֲשַׁ֖שׁ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 33:11 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
