לַפִּיד
torch
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 8 times (57%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (21%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (14%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (7%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 14 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3940 appears — 13 distinct verses across 9 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
Exodus 1 verse
Judges 4 verses
- Judges 7:16 וְ/לַפִּדִ֖ים conj + n c mp He divided the three hundred men into three companies, and he put into the hands of all of them trumpets, and empty pitchers, with torches within the pitchers.
- Judges 7:20 בַּ/לַּפִּדִ֔ים prep det + n c mp The three companies blew the trumpets, and broke the pitchers, and held the torches in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands with which to blow; and they cried, The sword of Yahweh and of Gideon.
- Judges 15:4 לַפִּדִ֗ים לַפִּ֥יד n c mp n c ms Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between every two tails.
- Judges 15:5 בַּ/לַּפִּידִ֔ים prep det + n c mp When he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing grain of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks and the standing grain, and also the olive groves.
Job 2 verses
Isaiah 1 verse
Ezekiel 1 verse
Daniel 1 verse
Nahum 1 verse
Zechariah 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 noun לפיד centers on the idea of “torch.” Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 15:17. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 13 verses — uncommon. Judges dominates its distribution — 4 of 13 verses. Sharing its root, it stands alongside לפידות. Dig into 13-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3940 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,910
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,910 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 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 13 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 62%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 23%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 15%
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: Lamps 4×
- American Standard Version: Torches 4×, Torch 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Torch 5×, Torches 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Torches 6×, Torch 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3940 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 H3940 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H3940 across 13 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3940 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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.
- torch
Word origin
n.m. Ju 15:4 torch (NH id.);—ל׳ abs. Ju 15:4; Is 62:1; cstr. Gn 15:17; Zc 12:6; pl. לַפִּידִים Ju 15:5 + 2 times, לַפִּידִם Ex 20:18, לַפִּדִים Ju 7:16 + 3 times; cstr. לַפִּידֵי Dn 10:6:—torch, Ju 7:16, 20; 15:4(×2), 5 (kindled, הִבְעִיר אֵשׁ בְּ׳); לַפִּיד אֵשׁ Gn 15:17 (+ תַּנּוּר עָשָׁן; JE), Zc 12:6 (sim. of conquering power of [chiefs of] Judah; ‖ בִּיּוֹר אֵשׁ), לַפִּידֵי אֵשׁ Dn 10:6 (sim. of eyes of angel in vision; ‖ וּפָנָיו כְּמַרְאֵה בָרָק); sim. of flashes (reflected from) darting chariots Na 2:5 (‖ בְּרָקִים); ל׳ of lightning-flashes Ex 20:18 (E; + קוֹלֹת thunder-peals); of flashing water-drops expelled by snortings of crocodile Jb 41:11 (‖ כִּידוֹדֵי אֵשׁ); of flame between cherubim Ez 1:13 (‖ גַּחֲלֵי־אֵשׁ, אֵשׁ); sim. of Zion’s glorious deliverance Is 62:1 (‖ נֹגַהּ).—לַפִּיד Jb 12:5 v. sub פִּיד.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root probably meaning to shine
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.
לַפִּיד
- a pot in which light is carried (v. Maim. to Kel. II, 8 a. Ar. s. v.); torch. Kel. II, 8 הל׳ (R. S. לפוד) the light-pot.—Midr. Till. to Ps. LII (ref. to Gen. XV, 17) ואין ל׳ אלא תורה וכ׳ torch means the Torah &c. (with ref. to Ex. XX, 18); a. e.—Pl. לַפִּידִים. Snh. 108ᵇ (ref. to לפיד, Job XII, 5) words שהם קשים כל׳ as hard as light-pots.—Trnsf. lightning, flash.—Pl. as ab. Mekh. Yithro s. 9 (ref. to Ex. l. c.) קולי קולות ולַפִּידֵי ל׳ various sounds and various flashes; וכמה … וכמה ל׳ היו were there various kinds of sounds? various kinds of flashes?; a. e. e.g. Genesis 15:17
לַפִּיד ²
- Gen. R. s. 30 (ref. to לפיד, Job XII, 5) תמן אמרין כרוז ליה ל׳ ליה (Ar. לפד) there (in certain places) they say (instead of) ‘he has a crier’ (that walks before him): ‘he has a torch’ (carried before him), i.e. he is a distinguished person. e.g. Job 12:5
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 14 distinct written forms H3940 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3940, 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.
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 → 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 13 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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
- Genesis 15:17
- Exodus 20:18
- Judges 7:16
- Job 12:5
- Isaiah 62:1
- Ezekiel 1:13
- Daniel 10:6
- Nahum 2:4
- Zechariah 12:6
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.
