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נְסַךְ

drink offering

H5261 Strong's Hebrew
nᵉçak Transliteration
/nes-ak'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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.

נסך (nᵉçak) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “drink offering.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Ezra dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. A true hapax — its single appearance is Ezra 7:17. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
drink offering
Modern gloss
drink offering
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H5261 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ezra 7:17
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Ezra 7:17.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 1 distinct verse.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Drink offerings 1×
  • American Standard Version: Drink-offerings 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Drink offerings 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Drink offerings 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H5261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Drink offerings” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H5261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Drink-offerings” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H5261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Drink offerings” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H5261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Drink offerings” 1×

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.

  1. something poured out, libation, drink offering, libation offering

Word origin

[ נְסַךְ ] n.[m.] drink-offering;—pl. sf. Ezr 7:17

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from נסך (neçek) (H5262) — drink offering.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 2866a


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.

נָסַךְ

  • (b. h.) to pour, cast. Y. Ber. I, 2ᵈ top, v. מָסַךְ II.
    • 1. to offer a libation. Succ. IV, 9 ולִמְנַסֵּךְ אומרים לו וכ׳ and they said to him who offered the libation (of water), raise thy hand. Ib. שפעם אחת ני׳ אחד וכ׳ for once it happened, that a priest poured the libation out at his feet. Snh. 62ᵇ זיבח … וני׳ וכ׳ if one sacrificed, burnt incense, and offered a libation (to an idol) &c.; a. fr.—Cant. R. to IV, 12 מֵאָן היו ישראל מנטרים כל וכ׳ (read: מְנַסְּכִים, v. Matt. K. a. l.) whence did the Israelites take wine for their festive gatherings during the forty years &c.?
    • 2. to make wine forbidden (יֵין נֶסֶךְ) by the manipulation of a gentile suspected of dedicating it to idolatrous purposes. Keth. 27ᵃ; Sabb. 41ᵃ אין פנאי לנַסֵּךְ they do not take the time to manipulate the wine. Ab. Zar. 56ᵇ (in Chald. dict.) והא קא מנסך בידיה but might he not dedicate it to idolatry by putting his hand into it?; והא קא מנסך ברגל might he not do it with his foot (while treading the wine)? Gitt. V, 4 המנסך he who does damage to his neighbor by touching his wine for idolatrous purposes (v. interpret. ib. 52ᵇ). Y. Ab. Zar. IV, 44ᵃ bot. מנסך כל הבור he causes all the wine in the pit to be forbidden; a. fr.
    • to be offered as libation, to be poured on the altar. Pes. 22ᵃ כמים הנִיסָּסִין like the water which is poured on the altar, opp. הנשפכין which is poured out at the foot of the altar.
    • 1. same. Ib. המִתְנַּסְּכִים; a. fr.
    • 2. to be made forbidden (as dedicated to idolatry). Y. Ab. Zar. l. c. נתנ׳ הבור וכ׳ if the wine in the pit has been manipulated and become forbidden, the jet of wine poured into the pit becomes forbidden (affecting the wine in the vessel).

נְסַךְ

  • , esp. to offer a libation. Targ. Cant. IV, 15; a. e.
    • as preced. Pi. Targ. Ex. XXX, 9; a. fr.—Sabb. 41ᵃ לא מְנַסְּכֵי they will not take the time to manipulate &c., v. preced.
    • as preced. Hithpa. Targ. Num. XXVIII, 7; a. e.—Ab. Zar. 71ᵇ קמא קמא אינ׳ ליה every drop as it comes out becomes forbidden.

נֶסֶךְ

  • preced.)
  • 1. libation. Ex. R. s. 15 יֵין נ׳ wine from which a libation has been poured on the altar.—Pl. נְסָכִים, נְסָכִין; constr. נִסְכֶי, נִי׳. Zeb. IX, 1 הנ׳ ירדו the libations brought on the altar illegally, may be taken down. Tosef. ib. V, 1; Men. 15ᵇ, a. e. נסכי בהמה the libations connected with an animal sacrifice. Ib. II, 4 ונְסָכָיו and the libations belonging thereto; a. v. fr.
  • 2. יֵין נ׳ (יין שנתנסך לע"ז; abbrev. י"נ) wine known (or suspected) to have been manipulated by an idolater, wine forbidden to Jews because of such (known or suspected) manipulation. Ab. Zar. IV, 8 (55ᵃ) ואינו נעשה י׳'נ וכ׳ (Bab. ed. עושה) it does not become (the gentile does not make it) forbidden wine until &c. Ib. V, 1 לעשות עמו ביין נ׳ to work with him in wine dedicated to an idol. Ib. 2 יין נ׳ שנפל וכ׳ if forbidden wine was poured over grapes. Ib. 74ᵃ bot. יין נ׳ really idolatrous wine, opp. סתם יין suspected; a. fr.

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.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.

Reading settings

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