קַו
line
also: cord, measuring-line 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6957 appears in the Book of Psalms — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Psalms
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.
קו — transliterated qav — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “line.” It first appears in 2 Kings 21:13. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 14 verses — uncommon. More than a third of its appearances fall in Isaiah. The lexical range runs to 2 senses — “line” plus “cord” and “measuring-line”. See the sense tree, 14-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6957 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,513
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,513 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 14 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 6 verses 43%
- 2 Kings 1 verse 7%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 7%
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 14 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 10 verses · 71%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 29%
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: Line 18×
- American Standard Version: Line 18×
- Berean Standard Bible: Line 8×, Measuring line 7×, Powerful 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Line 11×, Measuring line 3×, Measuring line of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6957 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H6957 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 H6957 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6957 across 22 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.
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- cord, line, measuring-line
- (BDB) onomatapoetic mimicry of Isaiah's words, perhaps senseless
Word origin
n.m. Zc 1:16 line (cf. Köii 1, 40 Anm. 2);—abs. קַו Ez 47:3 + Zc 1:16 Qr (Kt קוה), קָ֑ו Is 34:17 +; cstr. קַו (קָ K3) 2 K 21:13 +;—measuring-line (ק׳ מִדָּה Je 31:39): 1 K 7:23 (Qr; Kt קוה, v. infr.) = 2 Ch 4:2, Ez 47:3; for marking off a possession in land Is 34:17 (fig.); especially נָטָה ק׳ עַל, in building, Jb 38:5 (fig. of earth), Zc 1:16 (יִנָּטֶה; ‖ יִבָּנֶה), so יָצָא ק׳ Je 31:39 (Qr; Kt קוה); נָטָה ק׳ of designing idol Is 44:13; marking off for destruction, נָטָה ק׳ עַל 2 K 21:13 Is 34:11 (תֹהוּ קַו־), נ׳ ק׳ La 2:8; so וְשַׂמְתִּ֫י מִשְׁפָּט לְקָ֔ו Is 28:17.—קַוָּם their chord = music ψ 19:5. Is 18:2, 7 v. קוקו infr.; 28:10, 13 v. i. קַו.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קוה (qâvâh) (H6960) — to wait.
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.
קוּ
- , in תֵּיקוּ, נֵיקוּ &c., v. קוּם ch.
קַו
- v. קָוָה)
- 1. circle, zone. Ḥag. 12ᵃ תהו קו ירוק וכ׳ tohu (Gen. I, 2) is the green (or yellow) circle which surrounds the whole world (the horizon); Yalk. Kings 185 (ref. to I Kings VII, 23) זה קו ירוק וכ׳ this is typical of the green circle &c. Num. R. s. 13 קו הים שעשה וכ׳ the circle encompassing the basin which Solomon made (I Kings l. c.); a. e.— [cavity,] the lower part of a trumpet. Kel. XI, 7, v. קב.—[Tanḥ. Aḥăré 1 קו שררתיה, v. קוֹשַׁרְתָּא.] e.g. Genesis 1:2
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 19 distinct written forms H6957 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6957, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 14 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 14 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
- 2 Kings 21:13
- 2 Chronicles 4:2
- Job 38:5
- Psalms 19:4
- Isaiah 28:10
- Jeremiah 31:39
- Lamentations 2:8
- Ezekiel 47:3
- Zechariah 1:16
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.
