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קֹבָה

belly

also: stomach, maw fuller range ↓

H6897 Strong's Hebrew
qôbâh Transliteration
/ko'-baw/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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.

The Hebrew noun קבה centers on the idea of “belly.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Numbers (100%). It occurs only once, in Numbers 25:8. Beyond “belly” it also covers “stomach” and “maw” — 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
belly
Modern gloss
belly
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 H6897 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.
Numbers 25:8
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Numbers 25:8.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 100%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Belly 1×
  • American Standard Version: Body 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Belly 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Stomach 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H6897 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Belly” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H6897 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Body” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H6897 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Belly” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H6897 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Stomach” 1×

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.

  • 1. abs. of sacrificial victim, assigned to priest, i.e. fourth stomach of ruminants
  • 2. sf. of woman, appar. more gen., belly

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

קֵבָה, sf. קֳבָתָהּ n.f. stomach, belly

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from קבב (qâbab) (H6895) — to curse.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 1979a


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.

*קַבָּה

  • (denom. of נָקַב) curse. Snh. 92ᵃ top (ref. to יקבהו, Prov. XI, 26) אין ק׳ אלא קללה (Ms. F. קֹב; Ag. Hatt. קוֹב, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 1) kabbah (the noun from the same root as יקבהו) means curse (with ref. to Num. XXIII, 8); (Yalk. Prov. 947 יקבוהו); Sot. 41ᵇ קוֹב. e.g. Proverbs 11:26

*קִבָּה

  • (denom. of קַב 2) to put the leg in a ḳab, to put on a wooden leg (pretending to be lame). Keth. 68ᵃ המְקַבֶּה את רגליו ואת שוקו Ar. ed. Koh. (read: … רגלו והמקפח את שוקו; ed. Only המקפח את שוקו), v. קָפַח.

קֵבָה

  • maw. Ḥull. XI, 1. Ib. 134ᵇ (ref. to Deut. XVIII, 3) להביא חלב שע"ג הק׳ וכ׳ this (הַ) serves to include the fat surrounding and inside the maw; a. e.—Esp. rennet, used to curdle milk. Ab. Zar. II, 5 קֵיבַת נבלה, קיבה של נ׳, v. עָמַד. Ib. קיבת עולה rennet of a burnt-offering. Y. Bets. I, 60ᵃ קיבת הגוי rennet supplied by a gentile. Ib. bot. ק׳ ממקום אחר באת the rennet in the maw comes from outside (is not considered a part of the animal itself); a. fr.—Pl. קֵבוֹת, קֵי׳. Ib. התירו קֵיבוֹתֵיהֶם they allowed to use the rennets of these sheep; Y. Ab. Zar. II, 41ᶜ bot. e.g. Deuteronomy 18:3

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 H6897, 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.

Derives from

Shares the same root

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 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.

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.