מַלְקוֹחַ
prey
‘prey’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Singular
- One.
- Dual
- Exactly two — for natural pairs and some measures of time.
2 distinct verses where H4455 appears in the Construct state, across 2 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Numbers 1 verse
Psalms 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.
מלקוח — transliterated malqôwach — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “prey.” More than half of its appearances fall in Numbers. It appears 8 verses across 3 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Debuting at Numbers 31:11, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. See the sense tree, 8-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4455 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 5 verses · 63%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 25%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Prey 4×
- American Standard Version†: Prey 4×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Plunder 2×, Spoils 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Booty 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4455 across 8† 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 H4455 across 8† 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4455 across 8† 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 H4455 across 9† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 2 senses 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.
- booty, prey
- jaw
Word origin
I. n.m. Is 49:25 booty, prey (cf. לָקַח 9);—הֲיֻקַּח מִגִּבּוֹר מ׳ Is 49:24 (‖ שְׁבִי), cf. v 25 (‖ id.); Nu 31:26 (‖ id.), 31:11 (‖ שָׁלָל), v 12 (‖ id. + שְׁבִי, i.e. here, only, disting. from captives), v 32 (‖ יֶתֶר הַבָּ֔ז), v 27.
II. n.[m.] jaw (as taking, seizing food);—du. sf. וּלְשׁוֹנִי מֻדְבָּק מַלְקוֹחָ֑י ψ 22:16 and my tongue is made to cleave to my jaws, i.e. my gums.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from לקח (lâqach) (H3947) — to take.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms H4455 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/מַּלְק֔וֹחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:27 | 2 |
| הַ/מַּלְק֑וֹחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:11 | 1 |
| הַ/מַּלְק֛וֹחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:12 | 1 |
| וּ/מַלְק֥וֹחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 49:25 | 1 |
| מַלְק֑וֹחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 49:24 | 1 |
| מַלְק֨וֹחַ֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 31:26 | 1 |
| מַלְקוֹחָ֑/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Dual, Construct | Psalms 22:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4455, 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
Shares the same root
- לקח leqach H3948 instruction
- מלקח melqâch H4457 snuffers
- מקח miqqâch H4727 receiving
- מקחה maqqâchâh H4728 ware
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 7 — 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 7 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.
