קָשַׁב
to hear
also: be attentive, heed, incline, attend fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Hiphil verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Cohortative
- A first-person volitional form expressing wish or resolve (“let me / let us write”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H7181 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 9 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.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 10:30 הַקְשִׁ֥יבִי Hiphil impv 2fs Cry aloud with your voice, daughter of Gallim! listen, Laishah! You poor Anathoth!
- Isaiah 21:7 וְ/הִקְשִׁ֥יב conj + Hiphil wpf 3ms and when he sees a troop, horsemen in pairs, a troop of donkeys, a troop of camels, he shall listen diligently with much heed.
- Isaiah 28:23 הַקְשִׁ֥יבוּ Hiphil impv 2mp Give you ear, and hear my voice; listen, and hear my speech.
- Isaiah 32:3 תִּקְשַֽׁבְנָה Qal impf 3fp The eyes of those who see shall not be dim, and the ears of those who hear shall listen.
- Isaiah 34:1 הַקְשִׁ֑יבוּ Hiphil impv 2mp Come near, you nations, to hear; and listen, you peoples: let the earth hear, and the fullness of it; the world, and all things that come forth from it.
- Isaiah 42:23 יַקְשִׁ֥ב Hiphil impf 3ms Who is there among you who will give ear to this? who will listen and hear for the time to come?
- Isaiah 48:18 הִקְשַׁ֖בְתָּ Hiphil pf 2ms Oh that you had listened to my commandments! then had your peace been as a river, and your righteousness as the waves of the sea:
- Isaiah 49:1 וְ/הַקְשִׁ֥יבוּ conj + Hiphil impv 2mp Listen, isles, to me; and listen, you peoples, from far: Yahweh has called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother has he made mention of my name:
- Isaiah 51:4 הַקְשִׁ֤יבוּ Hiphil impv 2mp Attend to me, my people; and give ear to me, my nation: for a law shall go forth from me, and I will establish my justice for a light of the peoples.
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.
At its core, קשב (qâshab) means “to hear.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “hearken” in the King James Version, “listen” (Berean Standard Bible) and “pay attention” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It appears 45 verses across 14 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its moderately common vocabulary. Scripture first uses it in 1 Samuel 15:22. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Qal and Hiphil. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7181 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 →
- 45
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 45 distinct verses.
- 14 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 14 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #796
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 796 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 45 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 45 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 23 verses · 51%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 22 verses · 49%
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: Hearken 16×, Attend 9×, Hearkened 2×
- American Standard Version: Hearken 12×, Attend 8×, Hearkened 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Listen 9×, Pay attention 9×, Attend 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pay attention 12×, Attend 7×, Listen attentively 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7181 across 46 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 19 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 H7181 across 45 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 21 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 H7181 across 46 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 17 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 H7181 across 55 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 19 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
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
[ קָשַׁב ] 46 vb. incline, attend, of ears
— 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.
קָשַב
- (b. h.) to be hard, stiff.
- [to prick up the ear,] to listen. Cant. R. to VIII, 13 אני … מַקְשִׁיבִים וכ׳ I and my household will listen to thy voice (of prayer). Sabb. 63ᵃ הקב"ה מַקְשִׁיב להם the Lord listens to them. Ib. שני … המקשיבים זה לזה וכ׳ two students who patiently listen to each other in discussions of the halakhah; a. e.
קְשַׁב
- , to be attentive, watchful. Gitt. 56ᵃ דאינהו קַשְׁבֵי דחייא וכ׳ Ar. (ed. ידעי) read: דאינהו ק׳ וידעי דחייא וכ׳ for they are watchful (distrustful), and they know that a live body is lighter &c.
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 40 distinct written forms H7181 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 H7181, 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 42 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 45 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
- 1 Samuel 15:22
- 2 Chronicles 20:15
- Job 13:6
- Psalms 5:2
- Proverbs 1:24
- Song of Solomon 8:13
- Isaiah 10:30
- Jeremiah 6:10
- Daniel 9:19
- Hosea 5:1
- Micah 1:2
- Zechariah 1:4
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.
