לָחַךְ
to lick
‘to lick’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘of ox licking up grass.’
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3897 appears in the Book of 1 Kings — 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.
1 Kings
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 לחך centers on the idea of “to lick.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its earliest occurrence is Numbers 22:4. Across 2 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Qal, Piel). 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 H3897 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.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 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) 3 verses · 60%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Lick up 2×
- American Standard Version: Enemies shall lick 1×, Lick 1×, Lick up 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lick 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: As 1×, Lick 1×, Licked up 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3897 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H3897 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3897 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H3897 across 6 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.
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 2 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
- of ox licking up grass.
Piel
- . lick up, fire fr. heaven the water in trench; of Isr. consuming produce of land; lick the dust, sign of humiliation
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
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.
לָחַךְ
- (b. h.) to lick, lap (cmp. לָחַת). Y. Meg. I, 71ᶜ bot. לוֹחֲכָהּ בלשונו והיא וכ׳ he licks it (the ink) off with his tongue (from the interspaces of the letters) so that the Divine Name remains intact. Ḥull. 142ᵃ פה … יִלְחוֹךְ עפר Oh that the mouth which gave forth pearls must now lick dust!; Kidd. 39ᵇ יְלַחֵךְ (Pi.). Esth. R. to IV, 15 כי לוֹחֵךְ הייתי וכ׳ for I should have been willing to lick the shoe of his (Haman’s) foot; a. e.
- same, esp. (of lapping flames) to lick up, dry up, make glowing. B. Kam. 6ᵃ לִחֲכָה נירו (Rashi לִי׳) it (the fire) lapped his neighbor’s ploughed field. Gen. R. s. 4, beg.; Yalk. Job 914. Y. Ḥag. II, 77ᵇ bot. מְלָחֶכֶת, v. לְחִיכָה. (Ruth R. to III, 13 מלהטת).
לְחַךְ
- Targ. I Kings XXI, 19 (h. text לקק). Ib. XVIII, 38. Targ. Mal. III, 19 יִלְחוֹךְ ed. Lag. (some ed. יַלְחֵיךְ Af.; h. text להט, v. preced.); a. e.—Ab. Zar. 28ᵃ לַחֲכוּהָ לשקיה they burned (cauterized) his shoulder (to get the poison out)…
- . same. Targ. Jud. VII, 5. Targ. Is. LXIV, 1; a. e.—Pes. 49ᵃ מְלָחֵיךְ פינכי dish-licker.
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 H3897 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יְלַחֲכ֤וּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Micah 7:17 | 2 |
| יְלַחֵ֑כוּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Isaiah 49:23 | 1 |
| יְלַחֵֽכוּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Psalms 72:9 | 1 |
| כִּ/לְחֹ֣ךְ | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Numbers 22:4 | 1 |
| לִחֵֽכָה | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | 1 Kings 18:38 | 1 |
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.
