מֶרְחָק
distant place
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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 13 times (76%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (18%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (6%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 17 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4801 appears — 17 distinct verses across 6 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 2 verses
Isaiah 7 verses
- Isaiah 8:9 מֶרְחַקֵּי n c mp cs Make an uproar, O you peoples, and be broken in pieces! And give ear, all you of far countries: gird yourselves, and be broken in pieces! Gird yourselves, and be broken in pieces!
- Isaiah 10:3 מִ/מֶּרְחָ֣ק prep + n c ms What will you do in the day of visitation, and in the desolation which shall come from far? to whom will you flee for help? and where will you leave your glory?
- Isaiah 13:5 מֶרְחָ֖ק n c ms They come from a far country, from the uttermost part of heaven, even Yahweh, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land.
- Isaiah 17:13 מִ/מֶּרְחָ֑ק prep + n c ms The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but he shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like the whirling dust before the storm.
- Isaiah 30:27 מִ/מֶּרְחָ֔ק prep + n c ms Behold, the name of Yahweh comes from far, burning with his anger, and in thick rising smoke: his lips are full of indignation, and his tongue is as a devouring fire;
- Isaiah 33:17 מַרְחַקִּֽים n c mp Your eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall see a land that reaches afar.
- Isaiah 46:11 מֶרְחָ֖ק n c ms calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country; yes, I have spoken, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it.
Jeremiah 5 verses
- Jeremiah 4:16 הַ/מֶּרְחָ֑ק ptcl def.art + n c ms make you mention to the nations; behold, publish against Jerusalem, [that] watchers come from a far country, and give out their voice against the cities of Judah.
- Jeremiah 5:15 מִ/מֶּרְחָ֛ק prep + n c ms Behold, I will bring a nation on you from far, house of Israel, says Yahweh: it is a mighty nation, it is an ancient nation, a nation whose language you don't know, neither understand what they say.
- Jeremiah 6:20 מֶרְחָ֑ק n c ms To what purpose comes there to me frankincense from Sheba, and the sweet cane from a far country? your burnt offerings are not acceptable, nor your sacrifices pleasing to me.
- Jeremiah 8:19 מַרְחַקִּ֔ים n c mp Behold, the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people from a land that is very far off: isn't Yahweh in Zion? Isn't her King in her? Why have they provoked me to anger with their engraved images, and with foreign vanities?
- Jeremiah 31:10 מִ/מֶּרְחָ֑ק prep + n c ms Hear the word of Yahweh, you nations, and declare it in the isles afar off; and say, He who scattered Israel will gather him, and keep him, as shepherd does his flock.
Ezekiel 1 verse
Zechariah 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.
“distant place” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מרחק (merchâq). Where the King James Version says “far,” newer translations reach for “afar” (Berean Standard Bible) and “far away” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 17 verses — uncommon. More than a third of its appearances fall in Isaiah. First canonically at Psalms 138:6, it enters the text early. See the sense tree, 17-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4801 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 →
- 17
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 17 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,671
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,671 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 17 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 17 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 14 verses · 82%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 18%
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: Far 8×, Afar off 2×
- American Standard Version: Far 8×, Afar 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Afar 5×, Distant 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Far away 5×, Distant 4×, Afar 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4801 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H4801 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H4801 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H4801 across 17 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.
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.
- distant place, distance, far country
Word origin
n.m. distant place, distance;—abs. מ׳ Is 10:3 +, מֶרְחַק ψ 138:6; pl. מֶרְחַקִּים Zc 10:9, מַר׳ Is 33:17; Je 8:19, cstr. מֶרְחַקֵּי־ Is 8:9;—distant place, far country Is 8:9 Zc 10:9; often c. צֶרֶץ: א׳ (ה)מֶרְחָק land of distance, distant land Is 13:5; 46:11; Je 4:16; 6:20; Pr 25:25, so c. pl. א׳ מרחקים Je 8:19, land of distances, i.e. of wide extent, Is 33:17; מִמּ׳ from far Is 10:3; 30:27 Je 5:15; Ez 23:40 Pr 31:14; fig. ψ 138:6; מִמּ׳ at a distance Je 31:10, to a distance Is 17:13.—בֵּית הַמּ׳ v. p. 112.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רחק (râchaq) (H7368) — to be far.
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.
מֶרְחָק
- distance. Yalk. Prov. 964 שבאת ממ׳ for she (Sarah) came from a distant land; a. e.
מְרָחַק
- (רְחַק) abominable, unclean. Targ. Job XV, 16 (h. text נתעב). Targ. O. Lev. VII, 18 (h. text פגול). Targ. O. Deut. VII, 26 דמ׳ that which is abominable (cmp. דִּמְחַמְרָא). Targ. Lev. XX, 21 (ed. Berl. מְרָחַקָא; h. text נדה); a. fr.—Pl. מְרַחֲקִין. Targ. Y. Deut. XXIV, 4.
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 14 distinct written forms H4801 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4801, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 17 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 17 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.
