מַכְתֵּשׁ
mortar
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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 H4388 appears — 2 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.
Judges 1 verse
Proverbs 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.
מכתש — transliterated maktêsh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “mortar.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than half of its appearances fall in Judges. Debuting at Judges 15:19, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with כתש and מכתש. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4388 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Hollow place 1×, Mortar 1×
- American Standard Version: Hollow place 1×, Mortar 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hollow place 1×, Mortar 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hollow place 1×, Mortar 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4388 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4388 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4388 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4388 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.
- mortar
Word origin
מַכְתֵּשׁ n.m. mortar (place of pounding, braying)
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כתש (kâthash) (H3806) — to pound.
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.
מַכְתֵּשׁ
- 1. mortar. Y. Peah II, 17ᵃ top, v. כָּתַשׁ.
- 2. mortar-shaped cavity;
- 3. jaw. Gen. R. s. 98 (expl. Jud. XV, 19) המקום ההוא מ׳ שמו that place was named Makhtesh (Cavity); ib. מלמד שהביא לו וכ׳ it intimates that the Lord opened to him a spring from between his (the ass’) teeth (taking מ׳ as jaw). e.g. Judges 15:19
- 4. an instrument of torture. Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. VII, 8, v. פֶּתִי. Pesik. Shek. p. 15ᵃ, v. חֲמוֹר.
מַכְתַּשׁ
- (כְּתַשׁ)
- 1. wound, plague, affliction. Targ. Ex. XI, 1. Targ. Lev. XIII, 29; a. fr.—[Targ. Y. Gen. XII, 19 fem.]—Pl. מַכְתָּשִׁין, מַכְתְּ׳. Targ. Gen. XII, 17. Targ. Ps. LXXXIX, 33.
- 2. [pounding.—Pl. מַכְתָּשֵׁי, מַכְתְּ׳. Targ. Prov. XXVII, 22, combining massoretic vers. with one from which LXX. a. Pesh. are translated, v. אוּרְדָּךְ.]
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 H4388 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּֽ/מַּכְתֵּ֡שׁ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 27:22 | 1 |
| הַ/מַּכְתֵּ֣שׁ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 15:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4388, 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.
Derives from
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 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.
