נְחוּשָׁה
bronze
‘bronze’ is one of 3 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
- 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.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5154 appears — 10 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.
Leviticus 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
Job 4 verses
- Job 20:24 נְחוּשָֽׁה n c fs He shall flee from the iron weapon. The bronze arrow shall strike him through.
- Job 28:2 נְחוּשָֽׁה n c fs Iron is taken out of the earth, And copper is smelted out of the ore.
- Job 40:18 נְחוּשָׁ֑ה n c fs His bones are like tubes of brass. His limbs are like bars of iron.
- Job 41:27 נְחוּשָֽׁה n c fs He counts iron as straw; And brass as rotten wood.
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
Micah 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.
נחושה (nᵉchûwshâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “bronze.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “brass” in the King James Version, “bronze” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It turns up in 10 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. It concentrates in Job, which alone accounts for 40% of its uses. Not a single-sense word: explore its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5154 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,342
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,342 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 10 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 10 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 40%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 10%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Brass 6×, Steel 3×
- American Standard Version†: Brass 8×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Bronze 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Bronze 7×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5154 across 10† 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5154 across 9† 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5154 across 10† 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 H5154 across 10† 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 the full BDB
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.
נחושה I of bronze
נחושה II and (Lv 26
- 1. copper, produced from ore by melting Jb 28:2. e.g. Job 28:2
- 2. copper, doubtless hardened with alloy, = bronze, as material of bow 2 S 22:35 = ψ 18:35, Jb 20:24; gates Is 45:2; fig. of strength Jb 40:18 (bones of hippopotamus), cf. 41:19, Mi 4:13 (hoofs of Zion); of obstinate brow Is 48:4 (‖ גִּיד בַּרְזֶל עָרְפֶּ֑ךָ); unproductive earth Lv 26:19. e.g. 2 Samuel 22:35
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
I. adj. of bronze;—אִם־בְּשָׂרִי נ׳ Jb 6:12 or is my flesh of bronze? fig. for strong, enduring (‖ אֲבָנִים; cf. 40:18).
I. and (Lv 26:19 Jb 40:18) נְחֻשָׁה n.f. copper, bronze (only poet.; cf. i. נְחשֶׁת);—נ׳ always abs.;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נחוש (nâchûwsh) (H5153) — bronze.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms H5154 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נְחוּשָֽׁה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 48:4 | 4 |
| כַּ/נְּחֻשָֽׁה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 26:19 | 1 |
| נְ֝חוּשָׁ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 18:34 | 1 |
| נְחוּשָׁ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 40:18 | 1 |
| נְחוּשָׁ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Micah 4:13 | 1 |
| נְחוּשָׁ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 22:35 | 1 |
| נְחוּשָׁה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 45:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5154, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 10 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.
