מַבּוּעַ
spring
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4002 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Ecclesiastes 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 35:7 לְ/מַבּ֣וּעֵי prep + n c mp cs The glowing sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water: in the habitation of jackals, where they lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes.
- Isaiah 49:10 מַבּ֥וּעֵי n c mp cs They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun strike them: for he who has mercy on them will lead them, even by springs of water will he guide them.
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.
מבוע — transliterated mabbûwaʻ — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “spring.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Isaiah. Debuting at Ecclesiastes 12:6, it then recurs through the corpus. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4002 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 2 verses 67%
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 33%
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: Springs 2×
- American Standard Version: Fountain 1×, Springs 1×, Them 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Springs 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Springs of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4002 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4002 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4002 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H4002 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- spring of water
Word origin
מַבּוּעַ n.[m.] spring of water
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נבע (nâbaʻ) (H5042) — to flow.
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.
מַבּוּעַ
- well, spring. Koh. R. to XII, 7 (ref. to Koh. ib. 6) כדו של … על מַבּוּעוֹ וכ׳ the (drawing) pitcher of Barukh over the well (of prophecy) of Jeremiah: כדו … על מבועו של ברוך the (pouring) pitcher of Jeremiah over the well (of inspiration) of Barukh; Lam. R. introd. (R. Josh. 2).—Pl. מַבּוּעִים, מַבּוּעִין. Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 1; Yalk. Ex. 257; a. e.
מַבּוּעַ ²
- Targ. Jer. XVIII, 14 (ed. Wil. מַבּוּעֵי pl.). Targ. Prov. XIV, 27; a. e.—Y. Ab. Zar. V, 44ᵈ הא מ׳ וכ׳ the well is before thee, drink! (i.e. do what you please, I shall not assist you). Y. Dem. I, 22ᵃ top לית מַבּוּעָן וכ׳ our well does not supply us.—Pl. מַבּוּעִין, מַבּוּעֵי. Targ. O. Ex. XV, 27. Targ. Is. XLIX, 10; a. e., v. supra.—[Targ. Ps. CIV, 6 מבועין Ms., v. מְבַזְעָא.]
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 3 distinct written forms H4002 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/מַּבּ֔וּעַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 12:6 | 1 |
| לְ/מַבּ֣וּעֵי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 35:7 | 1 |
| מַבּ֥וּעֵי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 49:10 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
