מֶרְחָב
wide place
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4800 appears in the Book of 2 Samuel — 1 distinct verse. 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.
2 Samuel
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.
The Hebrew noun מרחב centers on the idea of “wide place.” Psalms dominates its distribution — 3 of 6 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Samuel 22:20. Sharing its root, it stands alongside רחב, רחב and רחב. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4800 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 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: Large place 3×
- American Standard Version: Large place 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Open 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Open space 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4800 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H4800 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H4800 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H4800 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 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.
- broad or roomy place, wide, expanses
Word origin
מֶרְחָב n.[m.] broad, roomy, place
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רחב (râchab) (H7337) — to grow wide.
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.
רָחָב I
- (b. h.) pr. n. f. Rahab, a woman of Jericho who received the Israelitish spies. Zeb. 116ᵃ, sq. Sot. 34ᵃ. Meg. 15ᵃ; Taan. 5ᵇ; a. fr.
רָחַב
- (b. h.) to be wide.
- 1. (neut. verb) (neut. verb) to widen, be broader; to extend. Lev. R. s. 31 היו מקטינות … ומַרְחִיבוֹת וכ׳ (the windows of the Temple) became narrow towards the inside and wider towards the outside, in order to send light forth to the world; Pesik. Ḳumi, p. 145ᵃ, sq. Sifré Deut. s. 1; Yalk. Zech. 575 מַרְחֶבֶת, v. infra. Yalk. Is. 302, v. פָּתָה.
- 2. to broaden, widen; (with דעת) to comfort, gratify. Ber. 57ᵇ שלשה מַרְחִיבִין דעתו וכ׳ three things give a man comfort: a nice dwelling &c.
- 3. to amplify. B. Bath. 61ᵇ, v. מֵצַר.
- to be enlarged, extend. Cant. R. to VII, 5 עתידה … מִתְרַחֶבֶת וכ׳ Jerusalem will be enlarged on all sides; Sifré l. c.; Yalk. Zech. l. c. מרחבת.
רָחָב II
- preced.) wide, broad. Midd. IV, 7 מה ארי צר … ור׳ מלפניו וכ׳ (not ורוחב) as the lion’s body is narrow behind and wide in front, so was the Temple &c.; a. fr.—נפש ר׳ (wide desire,) ambition, greed, opp. שפלה. Ab. V, 19; a. e.—יד ר׳, v. יָד.—Pl. רְחָבִים, רְחָבִין; רְחָבוֹת. Tanḥ. B’haʿăl. 5 שהיו ר׳ מבחוץ וכ׳ they (the Temple windows) were wide without &c., v. preced.; Tanḥ. T’tsav. 6; Num. R. s. 15, beg. Y. Sot. IX, 24ᵃ bot., v. צַר; a. fr.
רְחַב
- , esp. (with or sub. נפשא) ambitious, greedy. Targ. Prov. XXVIII, 25 גברא ר׳ (Bxt. ר׳ נפשא; Ms. רעיינא, read: רחב עיינא or רחב רעיינא).
רֹחַב
- preced. wds.) width. Midd. II, 6 אורך … על ר׳ וכ׳ one hundred and twenty-five cubits in length by eleven in width. Ib. IV, 1 ורָחְבּוֹ וכ׳ and its width was ten cubits. Tam. 29ᵇ; Shek. VIII, 5 ורָחְבָּהּ; a. fr.—Sifré Deut. 120 בר׳ יד with liberality.
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 H4800 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַ/מֶּרְחָ֣ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 31:8 | 2 |
| בַּ/מֶּרְחָֽב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 4:16 | 1 |
| לְ/מֶרְחֲבֵי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Habakkuk 1:6 | 1 |
| לַ/מֶּרְחָ֑ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 18:19 | 1 |
| לַ/מֶּרְחָ֖ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 22:20 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4800, 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
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 8 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
