עָרַק
to gnaw
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6207 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Job 2 verses
- Job 30:3 הַֽ/עֹרְקִ֥ים ptcl def.art + Qal ptcp.act mp They are gaunt from lack and famine. They gnaw the dry ground, in the gloom of waste and desolation.
- Job 30:17 וְ֝/עֹרְקַ֗/י conj + Qal ptcp.act mp cs + sfx pers 1cs In the night season my bones are pierced in me, And the pains that gnaw me take no rest.
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, ערק (ʻâraq) means “to gnaw.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in Job (100% of all occurrences). First canonically at Job 30:3, it enters the text early. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6207 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 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: Fleeing 1×, Sinews 1×
- American Standard Version: Me 1×, They gnaw 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gnawing pains 1×, They gnawed 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ones gnawing 1×, Ones gnawing me 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6207 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6207 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6207 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6207 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Qal) to gnaw, chew
Word origin
[ עָרַק ] vb. gnaw;— Qal Jb 30:3
— 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.
עָרַק
- [to pass, squeeze through,] (denom. of עַרְקָא) to strap. Tanḥ. Mishp. 1 עזוב … עֲרוֹק מכאן loosen a little on this side, lift …, strap on that side.
עֲרַק
- (preced.; cmp. ברח) to flee, run. Targ. Gen. XIV, 10; a. fr.—B. Mets. 84ᵃ אבוך ע׳ … ואת עֲרִיק ללודקיא (Ms. M. ברח) thy father fled (from persecution) to A., flee thou to Laodicea; Y. Maasr. III, 50ᵈ bot. עד דעַרְקַת וכ׳ (I shall call thee so,) until thou runnest away and goest &c. Gen. R. s. 31 (עָרְקִין) עֲרִיקִין הוינן מן קומי וכ׳ we were fugitives from a (Roman) troop, and living in &c., v. בְּטִיטָא; Y. Pes. I, beg. 27ᵃ כד הוינן ערקין וכ׳. Ab. Zar. 16ᵃ דכי שלים … מֵעֲרַק עַרְקֵי for when their weapons (missiles) are spent, they run away (and do not attack with their shields). Y. Sabb. XVI, end, 15ᵈ פריס … ונורא עַרְקָא מינה he spread his cloak …, and the fire fled from it (v. גָּדִישָׁא); a. fr.—[Gitt. 78ᵃ, v. עֲדַק.]
- 1. to put to flight, chase. Targ. Deut. XXXII, 30 יְעָרְקוּן (not יֶעֶרְ׳, יְעִירְ׳). Targ. Prov. XIX, 26 מְעָרֵיק (ed. Wil. מְעַרֵ׳; some ed. מַעֲרִיק Af.); a. e.
- 2. to save. Targ. Jud. VI, 11 לעָרָקָא (ed. Wil. לַעֲרָ׳ Af.).
- same. Targ. Job XLI, 20 יַעֲרִיק׳ (ed. יְעַרְק׳ Pa.). Targ. Prov. XVI, 28 מַעֲרִיק וכ׳ causes his friend to flee (him) (Var. מעדיק, v. עֲדַק); a. e., v. supra.
עֵרֶק
- , pl. עֲרָקִין, substitute for עֲרָכִין, v. עֵרֶף.
עָרָק
- (v. next w.)
- 1. a long and flat vessel made of rush, Maim.; [oth. opin. sieve; cmp. אֲרָק a. עֲדָק I]. Kel. XVI, 3; Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. V, 13.
- 2. bandage, compress. Sabb. 54ᵇ Ms. O., v. עֲדָק II.
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 2 distinct written forms H6207 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַֽ/עֹרְקִ֥ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 30:3 | 1 |
| וְ֝/עֹרְקַ֗/י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Job 30:17 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
