מָתֹק
to be sweet
‘to be sweet’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
3 distinct verses where H4985 appears in the Qal stem, across 3 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Proverbs 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.
At its core, מתק (mâthaq) means “to be sweet.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Job (40%), then Exodus and Psalms. It first appears in Exodus 15:25. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4985 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 80%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
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: Are sweet 1×, Be sweet 1×, Shall be sweet 1×
- American Standard Version: Are sweet 1×, Be sweet 1×, Shall be sweet 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is sweet 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Are sweet 1×, Became sweet 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4985 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4985 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4985 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4985 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- to be or become sweet or pleasing
(Qal)
- (Hiphil) to give sweet taste
Word origin
Origin: a primitive root
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.
מָתַק
- (b. h.)
- 1. to be sweet, palatable. Ukts. III, 4 עד שיִמְתּוֹקוּ until they are made palatable (by pressing). Gen. R. s. 85 יִמְתַּק לכם may it be sweet to (well agree with) you, v. בָּסַם.
- 2. to partake with delight, smack, gnaw. Yalk. Job 910 (ref. to Job XXIV, 20) שמָתַק רמה מהם the worm gnawed at them with delight; Gen. R. s. 33 שמִיתְּקוּ רמה מהם (Pi.) the worms did &c.—Yalk. Prov. 962 סופו להיות מוֹתֵק עליו shall finally feed on him; ib. 961 מותח (corr. acc.). e.g. Job 24:20
- 1. to partake with delight, s. supra.
- 2. to sweeten, season. Tosef. Bets. III, 15 אין מְמַתְּקִין וכ׳ you must not (on the Holy Day) sweeten a mustard mixture by dipping a live coal into it; Sabb. 134ᵃ; Y. Bets. IV, 62ᶜ bot. Sabb. 90ᵃ למַתֵּק קדרה to season a dish. Ber. 5ᵃ מלח מְמַתֶּקֶת וכ׳ salt seasons the meat; a. fr.—Trnsf. to pacify. Y. Ab. Zar. II, 42ᵃ top והוא יודע למתק וכ׳ he knows how to calm the great Ocean. Y. Meg. III, 74ᵃ bot. (in a secret letter) תמר … ובקשנו למַתְּקָה וכ׳ Tamar still endures in her bitterness (hostility), and we attempted to sweeten her (by bribery), ‘but the melter has refined in vain’ (Jer. VI, 29). e.g. Jeremiah 6:29
- 3. to indulge. Yalk. Prov. 961 (ref. to Prov. XXIX, 21) כל מי שמְמַתֵּק וכ׳ he who indulges his passion in his youth (v. מָנוֹן).—Taan. 9ᵇ, v. infra. e.g. Proverbs 29:21
- to sweeten. Cant. R. to V, 16 (play on ממתקים, ib.) ה׳ להם וכ׳ he sweetened (softened) the word for them; Num. R. s. 10, beg.
- to become sweet, to be quieted. Y. Ab. Zar. l. c. בשעה שהמים … מִתְמַתְּקִין when the waters praise their Creator, they grow calm. Gen. R. s. 13, a. e. מִתְמַתְּקִים הן בעבים (some ed. ממת׳, corr. acc.) the salt water becomes sweet in the clouds; Taan. 9ᵇ Ms. M. (ed. ממתקין, corr. acc.).
מְתַק
- v. מְתִיק
- to taste, suck (v. preced.). Ab. Zar. 18ᵇ טמש בהא ומ׳ בהא he dipped one finger (into it) and sucked the other.
- to become sweet. Targ. II Chr. XIII, 5.
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 H4985 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַֽ/יִּמְתְּק֖וּ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Exodus 15:25 | 1 |
| יִמְתָּ֑קוּ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Proverbs 9:17 | 1 |
| מָֽתְקוּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Job 21:33 | 1 |
| נַמְתִּ֣יק | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural | Psalms 55:14 | 1 |
| תַּמְתִּ֣יק | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Job 20:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4985, 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.
Derived from this word
- ממתק mamtaq H4477 sweetness
- מתוק mâthôwq H4966 sweet
- מתק metheq H4986 sweetness
- מתק môtheq H4987 sweetness
- מתק mâthâq H4988 to feed sweetly
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 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
