נִיחֹחַ
soothing
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).
Every verse where H5207 appears in the Book of Ezekiel — 4 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.
Ezekiel
- Ezekiel 6:13 נִיחֹ֔חַ n c ms You shall know that I am Yahweh, when their slain men shall be among their idols round about their altars, on every high hill, on all the tops of the mountains, and under every green tree, and under every thick oak, the places where they offered sweet savor to all their idols.
- Ezekiel 16:19 נִיחֹ֖חַ n c ms My bread also which I gave you, fine flour, and oil, and honey, with which I fed you, you did even set it before them for a sweet savor; and [thus] it was, says the Lord Yahweh.
- Ezekiel 20:28 נִיח֣וֹחֵי/הֶ֔ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp For when I had brought them into the land, which I swore to give to them, then they saw every high hill, and every thick tree, and they offered there their sacrifices, and there they presented the provocation of their offering; there also they made their sweet savor, and they poured out there their drink-offerings.
- Ezekiel 20:41 נִיחֹחַ֮ n c ms As a sweet savor will I accept you, when I bring you out from the peoples, and gather you out of the countries in which you have been scattered; and I will be sanctified in you in the sight of the nations.
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.
The Hebrew noun ניחוח centers on the idea of “soothing.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “sweet” in the King James Version, “pleasing” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It turns up in 43 verses across 5 books, a moderately common footprint. The word gravitates to Numbers (42%), then Leviticus and Ezekiel. Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 8:21. Dig into 43-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5207 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 →
- 43
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 43 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #837
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 837 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 43 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 43 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 39 verses · 91%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 9%
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: Sweet 39×
- American Standard Version: Sweet 39×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pleasing 39×, Fragrant 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pleasing 24×, Soothing 11×, Appeasement 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5207 across 43 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5207 across 43 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5207 across 43 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H5207 across 43 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.
- soothing, quieting, tranquillising
Word origin
and (Lv 1:9) נִיחוֹחַ43 n.[m.] a quieting, soothing, tranquillizing (cf. i. נַחַת Jb 36:16) (ריח ניחח also Ecclus 45:16 c; on format. v. Ol§ 187 b Sta§ 233 BaNB § 142 Köii. 1, 151, 489, where, after PhilippiBAS ii. 362, ִי expl. as dissim. from וֹ);— abs. נ׳ Gn 8:21 +; sf. נִיחֹחִי Nu 28:2, נִיחֹחֲכֶם Lv 26:31, נִיחוֹחֵיהֶם Ez 20:28;—a soothing, tranquilizing, only in phr. רֵיח נ׳ = soothing, tranquillizing odour of sacrifices acceptable to י׳ Gn 8:21 (J), Ex 29:18, 25, 41 Lv 1:9, 13, 17 + 32 times P. Ez 20:41; of sacrif. to idols † Ez 6:13; 16:19; 20:28.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נוח (nûwach) (H5117) — to rest.
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.
נִיחוֹחַ
- pleasing. Koh. R. to IX, 7 כריח נ׳ like the pleasing flavor (of a sacrifice); a. e.
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 H5207 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 H5207, 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
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 → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 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 43 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 43 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.
