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מִקְשָׁה

hammered work

H4749 Strong's Hebrew
miqshâh Transliteration
/mik-shaw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 10 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

At its core, מקשה (miqshâh) means “hammered work.” Its uses cluster heavily in Exodus (67% of all occurrences). Spanning 9 verses in 3 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Exodus 25:18. The King James Version usually renders it “beaten work,” while modern versions prefer “hammered” (Berean Standard Bible) and “hammered work” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
beaten
Modern gloss
hammered work
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H4749 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 →

9
distinct verses
The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
3 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
Exodus 25:18
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Exodus 25:18.
Jeremiah 10:5
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Jeremiah 10:5.
#2,342
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,342 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 8 · 89%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 11%

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 9 distinct verses.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 8 verses · 89%
  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 11%

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: Beaten work 5×
  • American Standard Version: Beaten work 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Hammered 7×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hammered work 6×, Hammered work of 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H4749 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Beaten work” 5×

Plus 5 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 H4749 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Beaten work” 5×

Plus 5 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 H4749 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Hammered” 7×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H4749 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Hammered work” 6×
  • “Hammered work of” 3×

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 the full BDB

What do BDB’s symbols mean?

BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:

Symbol Meaning
𝔊 the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX)
𝔙 the Vulgate (the Latin translation)
𝔖 the Syriac version (the Peshitta)
𝔗 the Targum (the Aramaic translation)
ψ the Psalms
√ root (the underlying root or stem)
‖ parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel)
† the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited

The 0 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.

מקשה I place, field, of cucumbers, Is 1

מקשה II perhaps hammered work, only of metals (orig. turner’s work?)

Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.


Word origin

III. n.f. place, field, of cucumbers, Is 1:8; so Je 10:5 Gf Gie al. (cf. Baruch 6:70).

IV. n.f. perhaps hammered work, only of metals (orig. turner’s work?);—abs. מ׳, of cherubim in tabern. Ex 25:18; 37:7, lamp-stand 25:31, 36; 37:17, 22 Nu 8:4(×2), clarions 10:2.—i. מ׳ v. קשׁא.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from מקשה (miqsheh) (H4748) — turned work.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 2086b


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.

מִקְשָׁה

  • (b. h.; = מקשאה,, v. קִשּׁוּאִים) cucumber field, in gen. truck-farm. Tosef. Ter. I, 4; Y. ib. I, 40ᵇ bot. Tosef. B. Mets. IX, 32; a. e. (v. also מוּקְשֶׁה).—Pl. מִקְשָׁאוֹת, מִקְשָׁיוֹת, מִקְשָׁאִין. Shebi. II, 1 ליטע במ׳ (Ms. M. מקשות, corr. acc.; Maim. מקשיות), v. מִדְלַעַת.—In gen. מ׳ ומדלעות late vegetables or fruits. Pes. 6ᵇ. Erub. 104ᵃ מִקְשָׁאָיו ומִדְלָעָיו ed. Sonc. (Ms. O. ודלעיו; Ms. M. מקשאיו ומדלעיו, ed. only ודלעיו) (who guards) his late fruits; a. e.—[Sabb. 90ᵇ מקשה של חזיר, read: מִקָּשֶׁה. v. קָשֶׁה.]

מַקְשֶׁה

  • , disputant, undecided. Hor. 14ᵃ חריף ומ׳ quick but undecided, opp. to מתון ומסיק slow but coming to a conclusion.

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 5 distinct written forms H4749 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
מִקְשָׁ֥ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Exodus 25:36 3
מִקְשָׁ֞ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Exodus 25:31 2
מִקְשָׁ֣ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Numbers 8:4 2
מִקְשָׁה֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Exodus 25:18 2
מִקְשָׁ֖ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Numbers 10:2 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.