יָקֹשׁ
to snare
‘to snare’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Niphal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘lay snares’
Form
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- 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”).
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
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”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Niphal, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (13%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3369 appears — 8 distinct verses across 6 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Psalms 2 verses
Proverbs 1 verse
Ecclesiastes 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 8:15 וְ/נוֹקְשׁ֖וּ conj + Niphal wpf 3cp Many shall stumble thereon, and fall, and be broken, and be snared, and be taken.
- Isaiah 28:13 וְ/נוֹקְשׁ֖וּ conj + Niphal wpf 3cp Therefore shall the word of Yahweh be to them precept on precept, precept on precept; line on line, line on line; here a little, there a little; that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.
Jeremiah 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.
The Hebrew verb יקש centers on the idea of “to snare.” Its earliest occurrence is Deuteronomy 7:25. Spanning 8 verses in 6 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Psalms dominates its distribution — 2 of 8 verses. The verb spans 3 stems, from Qal to Niphal. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3369 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 2 verses 25%
- Isaiah 2 verses 25%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 13%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 38%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 13%
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: Snared 2×
- American Standard Version: Snared 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Are ensnared 1×, Ensnared 1×, Fowler 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are snared 1×, Be ensnared 1×, They have laid 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3369 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3369 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 H3369 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3369 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Pual (the passive of Piel).
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 3 senses and sub-senses 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
- lay snares; Pt. as subst. bait-layers, fowlers
Niphal
- . be caught by bait, ensnared
Pual
- . entrapped
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
[ יָקֹשׁ ] vb. lay a bait or lure, then gen. lay snares
— 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.
יָקַשׁ
- to clap, catch in a trap.
- to be entrapped. Midr. Prov. to VI, 2 [read:] נוֹקַשְׁתֶּם באמרי פיכם וכ׳ you have been entrapped through your own words (Ex. XXIV, 7), you have been caught (taken captives) through (neglecting) them. e.g. Exodus 24:7
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 7 distinct written forms H3369 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/נוֹקְשׁ֖וּ | Verb, Niphal, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 8:15 | 2 |
| י֫וֹקְשִׁ֥ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 124:7 | 1 |
| יָ֣קְשׁוּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Psalms 141:9 | 1 |
| יָקֹ֨שְׁתִּי | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Jeremiah 50:24 | 1 |
| יֽוּקָשִׁים֙ | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 9:12 | 1 |
| נוֹקַ֥שְׁתָּ | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 6:2 | 1 |
| תִּוָּקֵ֣שׁ | Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 7:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3369, 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.
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). 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 8 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.
