נְקָמָה
vengeance
‘vengeance’ 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
- 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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5360 appears in the Book of Lamentations — 1 distinct verse. 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
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, נקמה (nᵉqâmâh) means “vengeance.” Scripture first uses it in Numbers 31:2. Spanning 22 verses in 7 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Jeremiah (41% of all occurrences). Carrying more than one sense, it rewards its full sense range. Dig into 22-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5360 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 →
- 22
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 22 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,226
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,226 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 22 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 22 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 68%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 23%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 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: Vengeance 15×, Is the vengeance 2×, Revenge 2×
- American Standard Version: Vengeance 12×
- Berean Standard Bible: Vengeance 20×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Vengeance 13×, Vengeance of 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5360 across 23 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5360 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 H5360 across 24 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 3 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5360 across 19 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 3 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.
- 1. vengeance of God, abs. Ez 25:14; נקם נ׳ Je 51:36; נִקְמַת דַּם ψ 79:10; אֵל נְקָמוֹת 94:1(×2); עֵת נ׳ Je 51:6; יוֹם נ׳ Je 46:10; נ׳ יהוה 50:15, 28; 51:11; נ׳ הֵיכָלוֹ 50:28; 51:11; c. בְּ of adversary, נתן נ׳ Ez 25:14, 17; עשׂה נ׳ Ez 25:17; c. מִן of adversary נתן נ׳ 2 S 4:8 עשׂה נ׳ Ju 11:36; נִקְמָֽתְךָ מֵהֶם Je 11:20; 20:12; c. לְ for whom נתן נ׳ 2 S 22:48 = ψ 18:48. e.g. Ezekiel 25:14
- 2. of Israel and its chiefs נקם נ׳ מן Nu 31:2 (P); c. בְ׳, נתן ני׳ Nu 31:3 (P); עשׂה נ׳ ψ 149:7. e.g. Numbers 31:2
- 3. enemies of Israel abs. La 3:60; עשׂה בנקמה Ez 25:15; of Jeremiah לקח נ׳ מן Je 20:10. e.g. Lamentations 3:60
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
n.f. vengeance (on format. cf. LagBN 143);—נ׳ Je 46:10 + 3 times; cstr. נִקְמַת Nu 31:2 + 7 times; sf. נִקְמָתִי Ez 25:14 + 7 times sfs.; pl. נְקָמוֹת Ju 11:36 + 5 times; נְקָמֹת 2 S 22:48;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נקם (nâqâm) (H5359) — vengeance.
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.
נְקָמָה
- (b. h.) same. Ber. 33ᵃ (ref. to Ps. XCIV, 1) גדולה נ׳ וכ׳ divine judgment is something great, for it is placed between two divine names. Ex. R. s. 20 עד שאנקום קְמָתָן וכ׳. until I execute judgment for the slaughter of the Ephraimites. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXLIX, 7 איזו היא נ׳ … מה שנקמו לישראל what revenge is meant here?… the revenge for the evil they did to Israel. Ib. ולא נִקְמַת אדם nor will it be a revenge executed by man; a. fr.—Pl. נְקָמוֹת. Ib. כל הנ׳ האילו יש וכ׳ all these retaliations are reserved with the Lord for the wicked; a. e.—[Ber. l. c. שתי נ הללו וכ׳ why these two judgments (n’ḳamah in the plural)?; v., however, הוֹפָעָה.] e.g. Psalms 94:1
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 22 distinct written forms H5360 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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 17 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 22 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.
