קֶ֫מַח
flour
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 H7058 appears in the Book of 1 Samuel — 2 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.
1 Samuel
- 1 Samuel 1:24 קֶ֨מַח֙ n c ms When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bulls, and one ephah of meal, and a bottle of wine, and brought him to the house of Yahweh in Shiloh: and the child was young.
- 1 Samuel 28:24 קֶ֣מַח n c ms The woman had a fattened calf in the house; and she hurried, and killed it; and she took flour, and kneaded it, and did bake unleavened bread of it:
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.
“flour” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun קמח (qemach). Scripture first uses it in Genesis 18:6. With 14 verses in 10 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in 1 Kings, which alone accounts for 29% of its uses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7058 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.
- 10 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 10 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,910
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,910 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 14 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 14 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 11 verses · 79%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 14%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 7%
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: Meal 10×, Flour 4×
- American Standard Version: Meal 13×
- Berean Standard Bible: Flour 12×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Flour 14×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7058 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7058 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7058 across 14 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7058 across 14 tagged occurrences — 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.
- flour, meal, meal flour
Word origin
n.[m.] flour, meal;—abs. ק׳ 1 S 1:24 +, קָ֑מַח Is 47:2; cstr. קֶמַח Nu 5:15;—Ju 6:19 (material for unleavened cakes), 1 S 1:24; 28:24; 2 K 4:41; defined by סֹלֶת (q.v.) Gn 18:6, disting. from סֹלֶת 1 K 5:2; of barley (שְׂעֹרִים) Nu 5:15 (P), but 2 S 17:28 + חִטִּם, שְׂעֹרִים, קָלִי; + other articles of food 1 Ch 12:41 (van d. H. v 40); kept in a כַּד 1 K 17:12, 14, 16; made by grinding Is 47:2; צֶמַח בְּלִי יַעֲשֶׂה ק׳ Ho 8:7.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root probably meaning to grind
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.
קְמַח
- (denom. of קִמְחָא) to dress hides with flour. Part. pass. קָמִיחַ. Meg. 19ᵃ, v. דִּיפְתְּרָא; Gitt. 22ᵃ; Sabb. 79ᵃ, v. מַצָּה; a. e.
- to pulverize. Naz. 53ᵇ דאַקְמַח אַקְמוּחֵי he pulverized (the bones).
קֶמַח
- c. (b. h.; Assyr. Wœrterb. p. 5862)
- 1. flour, first flour, contrad. fr. סֹלֶת. Y. Peah VII, 20ᵃ bot.; Keth. 112ᵃ, a. e., v. קִיבָר. Ḥall. I, 6, v. חֲלִיטָה II; a. fr.—Ab. III, 17 אם אין ק׳ אין … אין ק׳ without flour (sustenance) no learning, without learning no flour (enjoyment of life).—Pl. קְמָחִים, קְמָחִין. Kidd. 53ᵃ; Men. 73ᵃ הללו … והללו מיני ק׳ these (the animal sacrifices) are blood offerings, those (the cakes &c.) are flour offerings. Y. Ḥall. I, 57ᵇ תבואה ק׳ ובציקות grains, flours, and doughs; a. e.
- 2. (from its color) mould gathered on wine. — Pl. as ab. Men. VIII, 7 אינו … מפני הק׳ one must not take for libation from the top of the cask on account of the mould. Ib. יין … ק׳ פסול wine on which mould is gathered is unfit for the altar.
קֶמַח ²
- , flour. Targ. O. Gen. XVIII, 6. Targ. Num. V, 15; a. e.—Keth. 62ᵇ קא נהלא ק׳ sifting flour. Bets. 29ᵇ, v. נְהַל; a. fr.—Pes. 84ᵃ; Yoma 46ᵃ, a. e. לקִימְחֵיה, v. חוּשׁ ch.; [Ar. quotes Var. לא חש לקַמֵּיה cares not what comes before him; v. Rabb. D. S. to Yoma l. c., note 3].—Pl. קִמְחִין, קִמְחַיָּא, קִי׳. Y. Yoma I, 38ᵈ top, a. e., v. קִמְחִית.
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 9 distinct written forms H7058 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| קֶ֣מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 18:6 | 4 |
| הַ/קֶּ֨מַח֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 17:14 | 2 |
| קֶ֨מַח֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 17:12 | 2 |
| וְ/קֶ֣מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 17:28 | 1 |
| קֶ֔מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 4:41 | 1 |
| קֶ֠מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 12:40 | 1 |
| קָ֑מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 47:2 | 1 |
| קָֽמַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 4:22 | 1 |
| קֶּ֔מַח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 8:7 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 13 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
- Genesis 18:6
- Numbers 5:15
- Judges 6:19
- 1 Samuel 1:24
- 2 Samuel 17:28
- 1 Kings 17:12
- 2 Kings 4:41
- 1 Chronicles 12:40
- Isaiah 47:2
- Hosea 8:7
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.
