צָהֵב
to gleam
‘to gleam’ 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
- Hophal
- The passive counterpart of the Hiphil (“he was caused to…”).
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6668 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Ezra 1 verse
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 gleam” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb צהב (tsâhab). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. It clusters heavily in Ezra, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. A true hapax — its single appearance is Ezra 8:27. Its meaning spans more than one sense — see its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6668 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezra 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: not separately translated
- Berean Standard Bible: Polished 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gleaming 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Does not render H6668 with a distinct English word (not separately translated in its 1 tagged occurrence).
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6668 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6668 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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 1 sense 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.
Hophal
- Pt. נְחשֶׁת מֻצְהָב Ezr 8:27 bronze of gleaming ware (so NH and—appar. Hebraism—𝔗 2 Ch 4:16). e.g. Ezra 8:27
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. gleam (NH id. (of face, bronze, etc.); Arabic صَهِبَ be red);—
— 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.
צָהַב
- 1. to be bright, shine. Men. 18ᵃ צָהֲבוּ פניו וכ׳ the face of R. J. brightened up (with joy); Ḥull. 7ᵇ; a. e.—Part. pass. צָהוּב; pl. צְהוּבִין. Ned. 49ᵇ היום פניך צ׳ thou lookest bright to-day.—V. צָהוֹב.
- 2. (cmp. כִּרְכֵּם) to be defiant. Sifré Deut. 309 היה עומד וצוֹהֵב כנגד וכ׳ stood up and insulted a senator in the street; Yalk. ib. 942.—Part. pass. as ab. jealous, angry. Snh. 105ᵃ שני … צ׳ זה לזה (Ms. O. a. Ar. צוֹהֲבִין) two watchdogs … who were jealous of each other. Tanḥ. Vaëra 14 אש וברד צ׳ וכ׳ fire and hail are hostile to each other (cmp. דָּבַב).
- 1. to become shining. Sifra Vayikra, N’dab., Par. 6, ch. VIII משיַצְהִיבוּ when the feathers of the pigeons begin to be shining, contrad. to הזהיב (of grown doves) to shine, v. זָהַב; Ḥull. 22ᵇ
- 2. (of metal) to be bright, burnished, gold-like. Midd. II, 3, a. e., v. נְחוּשְׁתָּן I.—Part. pass. מוּצְהָב; f. מוּצְהֶבֶת. Yoma 38ᵃ (some ed. מְצוּהֶבֶת Pu.), v. נְחוּשְׁתָּן I. [Ib. והיתה מאירה, Ms. M. 2 מַצְהֶבֶת.]
- 3. (cmp. כִּרְכֵּם) to grieve. M. Kat. 24ᵇ כיוצא … רבים מַצְהִיבִין עליו וכ׳ (Ms. M. מצווחין, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) if a corpse is carried out on a bier, the people grieve over it (in sympathy) &c.
צְהַב
- ; part. pass. צְהִיב grieved. Lev. R. s. 9 [read:] כדו דאפיך צְהִיבִין וכ׳ now that you grieve so much, we will go with you &c.
- to grieve, provoke. Targ. I Sam. I, 6.
- to be angry. Koh. R. to III, 6 עבד גרמיה מַצְהִיב עם בריה he pretended to be angry with his son.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6668, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
