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פִּשְׁתָּה

flax

‘flax’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

H6594 Strong's Hebrew
pishtâh Transliteration
/pish-taw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 4 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

פשתה (pishtâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “flax.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Isaiah, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. Debuting at Exodus 9:31, it then recurs through the corpus. It is not a single-sense word — see its full sense range. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
flax
Modern gloss
flax
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 H6594 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.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Exodus 9:31
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Exodus 9:31.
Isaiah 43:17
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Isaiah 43:17.
#3,696
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 33%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 2 · 67%

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.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
  • Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Flax 3×
  • American Standard Version: Flax 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Like a wick 1×, Now the flax 1×, Was ripe and the flax 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Flax 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H6594 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Flax” 3×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H6594 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Flax” 2×

Plus 2 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 H6594 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Like a wick” 1×
  • “Now the flax” 1×
  • “Was ripe and the flax” 1×
  • “Wick” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H6594 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Flax” 2×

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 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 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.

  • 1. growing
  • 2. = wick

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

Derived from פשתה (pishteh) (H6593) — linen.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 1849


Forms in the corpus

The 4 distinct written forms H6594 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.

Form Parsing Example Uses
וְ/הַ/פִּשְׁתָּ֖ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Exodus 9:31 1
וְ/הַ/פִּשְׁתָּ֥ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Exodus 9:31 1
וּ/פִשְׁתָּ֥ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Isaiah 42:3 1
כַּ/פִּשְׁתָּ֥ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Isaiah 43:17 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 3 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.