קוה
line
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6961 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
1 Kings 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Zechariah 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.
“line” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun קוה (qâveh). It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. More than a third of its appearances fall in 1 Kings. First canonically at 1 Kings 7:23, it enters the text early. Related forms include קוה, מקוה and קו. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6961 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #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 →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 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: Circumference 1×, Line 1×, Measuring line 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Measuring line 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Does not render H6961 with a distinct English word (not separately translated in its 3 tagged occurrences).
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6961 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6961 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- line
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.
קוי
- (b. h.) [to circle, v. קַו,] to cave or heap up, gather. Part. pass. קָווּי. Y. Ber. VI, 10ᵈ ואפי׳ ק׳ לתוך ידו even when the oil is held in the hollow of his hand.
- 1. to gather, to conduct water courses into a common bed. Y. Kil. IX, 32ᶜ bot.; Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵇ bot. דוקל׳ ה׳ נהרות ועשאו Diocletian united several rivers and made it (the bay of Emesa); Midr. Till. to Ps. XXIV (corr. acc.), v. חֲמָץ. Num. R. s. 13 כשה׳ הקב"ה וכ׳ when the Lord, on the third day of creation, gathered all the waters in one place; a. e.
- 2. to add to the capacity of a bath. Tosef. Shek. I, 2 כל מקוה … כשר להַקְווֹת עליו a bath which has the (legally required) capacity of forty S’ah is fit to be added to (by carrying water into it in vessels). Tosef. Mikv. III, 6; a. e.
- to look out (cmp. קַוָּא a. כַּוָּוא) to wait, hope. Gen. R. s. 5 (play on יִקָּווּ, Gen. I, 9) יְקַוּוּ לי המים מה וכ׳ let the waters look out for me (to see) what I shall do &c.; ib. s. 28; Lam. R. to I, 17; Yalk. Gen. 7; Yalk. Ps. 848; [perh. to be read יִקָּווּ Nif.]. Midr. Till. to Ps. VI והיה … מְקַוֶּה לרופא וכ׳ and the patient anxiously waited for the physician (asking), when will he come? &c.; Yalk. ib. 635. Cant. R. to II, 3, v. next w.; a. fr. e.g. Genesis 1:9
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 3 distinct written forms H6961 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ו/קוה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 7:23 | 2 |
| וְ/קָו֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 1 Kings 7:23 | 1 |
| קוה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 31:39 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6961, 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 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.
