נָשַׁב
to blow
‘to blow’ 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”).
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- 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”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5380 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 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.
Isaiah
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.
נשב — transliterated nâshab — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to blow.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. Its uses concentrate in Genesis (33% of all occurrences). Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 15:11. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Qal and Hiphil. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5380 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 33%
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: Blow 1×, Bloweth 1×, Drove them away 1×
- American Standard Version: Bloweth 1×, Drove them away 1×, He causeth his wind to blow 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Blows 1×, Drove them away 1×, He unleashes 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Away 1×, Blow 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5380 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5380 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5380 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5380 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
Qal
- Pf. 3 fs. רוּחַ י׳ נָֽשְׁבָה בּוֹ Is 40:7 the breath of י׳ has blown upon it. e.g. Isaiah 40:7
Hiphil
- Impf. 3 ms. יַשֵּׁב רוּחַ ψ 147:18 he causes his wind to blow; וַיַּשֵּׁב אֹתָם Gn 15:11 and he drove them away (perhaps orig. blow away, drive away by blowing, or by a sound like blowing). e.g. Psalms 147:18
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
vb. blow (NH = BH; 𝔗 נְשַׁב (but also נְתַב), Syriac ܢܫܰܒ, all blow; ‖ form of נָשַׁף);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
נָשַׁב
- (b. h.) to blow. Ber. 3ᵇ בא … ונוֹשֶׁבֶת בו (Ms. M. ומְנַשֶּׁבֶת Pi.) the north wind came and blew at him. Ab. III, 17 אפילו … ונוֹשְׁבוֹת בו even if all the winds of the world came and blew at it (to uproot it) &c.; Taan. 20ᵃ; a. fr.
- 1. same. Cant. R. to IV, 16. Yoma 21ᵇ; a. fr.
- 2. to cause to blow. Keth. 111ᵇ הקב"ה … ומְנַשְּׁבָהּ עליה the Lord brings a wind … and lets it pass over it (the wheat).
- same. מַשִּׁיב הרוח ומוריד הגשם ‘who causes the wind to blow and the rain to descend’, a clause inserted in G’buroth (v. גְּבוּרוֹת) during the winter season. Taan. 3ᵇ אמר משיב הרוח אין וכ׳ if he said in his prayers, ‘Who causes the wind to blow’ only. Ib. 24ᵃ אמר מ׳ הרוח וכ׳ as soon as he said, ‘Who causes &c.’, a wind arose; a. e.
נְשַׁב
- Targ. Is. XL, 7; a. e.—Taan. 24ᵃ, sq. ונ׳ זיקא (ed. once ונשא, v. נְשָׂא), v. preced.; B. Mets. 85ᵇ ונַשְׁבָהזיקא (Ms. M. נשא; Ms. R. נַשְׂיָא; v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note).
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 3 distinct written forms H5380 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/יַּשֵּׁ֥ב | Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Genesis 15:11 | 1 |
| יַשֵּׁ֥ב | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 147:18 | 1 |
| נָ֣שְׁבָה | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Isaiah 40:7 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
