מִשְׁכַּב
couch
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
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).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4903 appears — 6 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.
Daniel 6 verses
- Daniel 2:28 מִשְׁכְּבָ֖/ךְ n c ms cs + sfx pers 2ms but there is a God in heaven who reveals secrets, and he has made known to the king Nebuchadnezzar what shall be in the latter days. Your dream, and the visions of your head on your bed, are these:
- Daniel 2:29 מִשְׁכְּבָ֣/ךְ n c ms cs + sfx pers 2ms as for you, O king, your thoughts came [into your mind] on your bed, what should happen hereafter; and he who reveals secrets has made known to you what shall happen.
- Daniel 4:5 מִשְׁכְּבִ֔/י n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs I saw a dream which made me afraid; and the thoughts on my bed and the visions of my head troubled me.
- Daniel 4:10 מִשְׁכְּבִ֑/י n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs Thus were the visions of my head on my bed: I saw, and, behold, a tree in the midst of the earth; and the height of it was great.
- Daniel 4:13 מִשְׁכְּבִ֑/י n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs I saw in the visions of my head on my bed, and, behold, a watcher and a holy one came down from the sky.
- Daniel 7:1 מִשְׁכְּבֵ֑/הּ n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon Daniel had a dream and visions of his head on his bed: then he wrote the dream and told the sum of the matters.
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, משכב (mishkab) means “couch.” Its uses cluster heavily in Daniel (100% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 1 book, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Daniel 2:28. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4903 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 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).
- King James Version: Bed 6×
- American Standard Version: Bed 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bed 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bed 3×, I lay on my bed 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4903 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4903 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4903 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4903 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 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.
- couch, bed
Word origin
[ מִשְׁכַּב ] n.[m.] couch, bed
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from משכב (mishkâb) (H4904) — bed.
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.
מִשְׁכָּב
- 1. couch, bed; grave. Kidd. 31ᵇ כפרת מִשְׁכָּבוֹ, v. כַּפָּרָה. Keth. 104ᵃ; a. fr.—Esp. מ׳ (טומאת) the uncleanness caused by an unclean person lying on an object, v. מוֹשָׁב. Kel. I, 3; a. fr.—Pl. מִשְׁכָּבוֹת. Keth. l. c. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXLIX; a. e.
- 2. sexual connection. Snh. 55ᵃ; a. fr.—מִשְׁכַּב זכור (זכר) pederasty. Succ. 29ᵃ; a. fr.—Pl. as ab. Snh. l. c. שני מ׳ two ways (the natural and the unnatural way) of sexual gratification. Ib. 54ᵃ
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 H4903 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מִשְׁכְּבִ֑/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 4:10 | 2 |
| מִשְׁכְּבִ֔/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 4:5 | 1 |
| מִשְׁכְּבֵ֑/הּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 7:1 | 1 |
| מִשְׁכְּבָ֖/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 2:28 | 1 |
| מִשְׁכְּבָ֣/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 2:29 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 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.
