מָצוּק
pillar
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
- 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 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4690 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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 Samuel 2 verses
- 1 Samuel 2:8 מְצֻ֣קֵי n c mp cs He raises up the poor out of the dust, He lifts up the needy from the dunghill, To make them sit with princes, Inherit the throne of glory: For the pillars of the earth are Yahweh's, He has set the world on them.
- 1 Samuel 14:5 מָצ֥וּק n c ms The one crag rose up on the north in front of Michmash, and the other on the south in front of Geba.
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.
“pillar” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מצוק (mâtsûwq). It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in 1 Samuel. Its earliest occurrence is 1 Samuel 2:8. Related forms include צוק, מצוק and צוק. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4690 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Samuel 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 100%
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†: Pillars 1×, Was situate 1×
- American Standard Version†: Pillars 1×, Rose up 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Foundations 1×, Stood 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Pillars of 1×, Was a pillar 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4690 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4690 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4690 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4690 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.
- molten support, pillar, column
Word origin
n.m. molten support, pillar;—pl. cstr. מְצֻקֵי אֶרֶץ 1 S 2:8 the supports of the earth are י׳’s;—מָצוּק 14:5 (‘as a pillar,’ ‘steep,’ etc.) is difficult (cf. HPS); del. with 𝔊 Th Dr Bu.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צוק (tsûwq) (H6693) — to constrain.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H4690 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מְצֻ֣קֵי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | 1 Samuel 2:8 | 1 |
| מָצ֥וּק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 14:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4690, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. 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.
