נָבַט
to look
‘to look’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- 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”).
- Cohortative
- A first-person volitional form expressing wish or resolve (“let me / let us write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Jussive
- A third- or second-person volitional form expressing wish or command (“let him write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 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
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5027 appears in the Book of Lamentations — 6 distinct verses. 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.
Lamentations
- Lamentations 1:11 וְֽ/הַבִּ֔יטָ/ה conj + Hiphil impv 2ms + sfx h All her people sigh, they seek bread; They have given their pleasant things for food to refresh the soul: Look, Yahweh, and see; for I am become abject.
- Lamentations 1:12 הַבִּ֣יטוּ Hiphil impv 2mp Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by? Look, and see if there be any sorrow like my sorrow, which is brought on me, With which Yahweh has afflicted [me] in the day of his fierce anger.
- Lamentations 2:20 וְֽ/הַבִּ֔יטָ/ה conj + Hiphil impv 2ms + sfx h Look, Yahweh, and see to whom you have done thus! Shall the women eat their fruit, the children that are dandled in the hands? Shall the priest and the prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?
- Lamentations 3:63 הַבִּ֔יטָ/ה Hiphil impv 2ms + sfx h See you their sitting down, and their rising up; I am their song.
- Lamentations 4:16 לְ/הַבִּיטָ֑/ם prep + Hiphil inf.cs + sfx pers 3mp The anger of Yahweh has scattered them; he will no more regard them: They didn't respect the persons of the priests, they didn't favor the elders.
- Lamentations 5:1 הביט הַבִּ֖יטָ/ה Hiphil impv 2ms Hiphil impv 2ms + sfx h Remember, Yahweh, what has come on us: Look, and see our reproach.
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, נבט (nâbaṭ) means “to look.” It first appears in Genesis 15:5. Spanning 67 verses in 16 books, it ranks among the moderately common words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Psalms (25% of all occurrences). Not a single-sense word: explore its full sense range. 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 H5027 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 →
- 67
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 67 distinct verses.
- 16 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 16 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #569
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 569 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 67 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 17 verses 25%
- Isaiah 15 verses 22%
- Lamentations 6 verses 9%
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 67 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 30 verses · 45%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 29 verses · 43%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 8 verses · 12%
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: Look 12×, Looked 5×, Behold 4×
- American Standard Version: Look 15×, Behold 6×, Looked 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Look 16×, Looked 5×, Consider 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Look 21×, And 4×, Looked 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5027 across 69 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 33 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 H5027 across 66 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 32 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 H5027 across 68 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 33 renderings that appear 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 H5027 across 82 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 36 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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 2 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.
Piel
- . look
Hiphil
- . look
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
[ נָבַט ] vb. Pi., Hiph. look
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
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.
נָבַט
- Del. Proleg. p. 98) to burst forth, to shine
- 1. to illumine. Targ. II Esth. I, 2 (in an enigma about nafta) נשפך כמים ומַבִּיט לבית it is poured out like water and illumines the house.
- 2. (cmp. הֵצִיץ fr. צִיץ) to look. Yalk. Gen. 76 (ref. to Gen. XV, 5) אין הַבֵּט וכ׳ (Gen. R. s. 44 הַבָּטָה q. v.). Pesik. R. s. 21 [read:] האיקונין הזו … מַבִּיטִים בה … בי היא מַבֶּטֶת a thousand people look at a portrait, every one says, it is looking at me. Ib. ולהַבִּיט בכל אחד ואחד וכ׳ and for the Lord to look at every one of the Israelites and say &c. Ib. מה לך מביט באלו why dost thou look up to those men?; a. fr. e.g. Genesis 15:5
- same, to have a vision. Snh. 101ᵇ (play on נבט) שני׳ ולא ראה he (Nebat) had a vision but did not see (interpret it properly); ib. שלשה נִבְּטוּ וכ׳; Yalk. Kings 196.
נְבַט
- (v. preced.) to sprout, grow. Taan. 4ᵃ כיון דנ׳ נ׳ when it once has sprouted, it grows fast. M. Kat. 18ᵇ הדר נ׳ (the rumor after having died out) comes up again.
נְבָט I
- (b. h.) pl. n. m. Nebat, father of Joroboam I. Snh. 101ᵇ, v. נָבַט. Ber. 35ᵇ; a. fr.
נְבָט II
- Nebaṭ, an Arabic settlement south-east of Palestine (v. Sm. Bibl. Dict. s. v. Nebayoth). Targ. Is. LX, 7 (ed. Lag. a. oth. נביות). Targ. Y. Num. XI, 22. Targ. Ez. XXVII, 21 (h. text קֵדָר).
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 60 distinct written forms H5027 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5027, 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
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 60 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 67 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
- Genesis 15:5
- Exodus 3:6
- Numbers 12:8
- 1 Samuel 2:32
- 1 Kings 18:43
- 2 Kings 3:14
- 1 Chronicles 21:21
- Job 6:19
- Psalms 13:3
- Proverbs 4:25
- Isaiah 5:12
- Lamentations 1:11
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.
