אָפַק
to hold
also: be strong, restrain, hold back 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
- Hithpael
- The reflexive or reciprocal stem (the subject acts on itself).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- 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”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H662 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 3 distinct verses. 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
- Isaiah 42:14 אֶתְאַפָּ֑ק Hithpael impf 1cs I have long time held my peace; I have been still, and refrained myself: [now] will I cry out like a travailing woman; I will gasp and pant together.
- Isaiah 63:15 הִתְאַפָּֽקוּ Hithpael pf 3cp Look down from heaven, and see from the habitation of your holiness and of your glory: where are your zeal and your mighty acts? the yearning of your heart and your compassion is restrained toward me.
- Isaiah 64:12 תִתְאַפַּ֖ק Hithpael impf 2ms Will you refrain yourself for these things, Yahweh? will you hold your peace, and afflict us very sore?
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.
“to hold” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb אפק (ʼâphaq). Scripture first uses it in Genesis 43:31. It appears 7 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in Isaiah. Not a single-sense word: its full sense range also takes in “be strong”, “restrain”, and “hold back”. See the sense tree, 7-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H662 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 57%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 29%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 14%
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: Refrained 3×
- American Standard Version: Refrained 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Are restrained 1×, Control himself 1×, I felt compelled 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: But 1×, Control himself 1×, He controlled himself 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H662 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H662 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H662 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H662 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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. force, compel oneself
- 2. restrain oneself, refrain
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
[ אָפַק ] vb. hold, be strong —only Hithp.
— 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.
אַפֵּק
- (Af. of נפק q. v.) to bring out, take away.—לְאַפּוּקֵי to the exclusion of. Ned. 41ᵃ; a. fr. = למעוטי, להוציא, v. מעט, יצא.
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 7 distinct written forms H662 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֶתְאַפָּ֑ק | Verb, Hithpael, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Isaiah 42:14 | 1 |
| הִתְאַפָּֽקוּ | Verb, Hithpael, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 63:15 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּ֨תְאַפַּ֔ק | Verb, Hithpael, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Genesis 43:31 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּתְאַפַּ֣ק | Verb, Hithpael, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Esther 5:10 | 1 |
| וָֽ/אֶתְאַפַּ֔ק | Verb, Hithpael, Sequential Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | 1 Samuel 13:12 | 1 |
| לְ/הִתְאַפֵּ֗ק | Verb, Hithpael, Infinitive Construct | Genesis 45:1 | 1 |
| תִתְאַפַּ֖ק | Verb, Hithpael, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 64:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H662, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
