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רַ֫חַב

breadth

H7338 Strong's Hebrew
rachab Transliteration
/rakh'-ab/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

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.

“breadth” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun רחב (rachab). A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Job, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is Job 36:16. It clusters with רחב, מרחב and רחב under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
breadth
Modern gloss
breadth
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 H7338 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 36:16
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Job 36:16.
Job 38:18
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Job 38:18.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

  • Job 2 verses 100%

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 2 · 100%
  • 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 2 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Breadth 1×, Broad place 1×
  • American Standard Version: Breadth 1×, Broad place 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Broad place 1×, Extent 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Breadths of 1×, Broad place 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H7338 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breadth” 1×
  • “Broad place” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H7338 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breadth” 1×
  • “Broad place” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H7338 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Broad place” 1×
  • “Extent” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H7338 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Breadths of” 1×
  • “Broad place” 1×

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.

  1. breadth, broad or wide expanse

Word origin

n.[m. not f. Jb 36:16 AlbrZAW xvl (1896), 94 Di Bu] breadth, broad expanse;—abs. ר׳ Jb 36:16 (opp. צָ֑ר); pl. cstr. intens. רַחֲבֵי־אָ֑רֶץ 38:18 the broad expanse of earth.

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

Derived from רחב (râchab) (H7337) — to grow wide.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 2143a


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.

רָחָב I

  • (b. h.) pr. n. f. Rahab, a woman of Jericho who received the Israelitish spies. Zeb. 116ᵃ, sq. Sot. 34ᵃ. Meg. 15ᵃ; Taan. 5ᵇ; a. fr.

רָחַב

  • (b. h.) to be wide.
    • 1. (neut. verb) (neut. verb) to widen, be broader; to extend. Lev. R. s. 31 היו מקטינות … ומַרְחִיבוֹת וכ׳ (the windows of the Temple) became narrow towards the inside and wider towards the outside, in order to send light forth to the world; Pesik. Ḳumi, p. 145ᵃ, sq. Sifré Deut. s. 1; Yalk. Zech. 575 מַרְחֶבֶת, v. infra. Yalk. Is. 302, v. פָּתָה.
    • 2. to broaden, widen; (with דעת) to comfort, gratify. Ber. 57ᵇ שלשה מַרְחִיבִין דעתו וכ׳ three things give a man comfort: a nice dwelling &c.
    • 3. to amplify. B. Bath. 61ᵇ, v. מֵצַר.
    • to be enlarged, extend. Cant. R. to VII, 5 עתידה … מִתְרַחֶבֶת וכ׳ Jerusalem will be enlarged on all sides; Sifré l. c.; Yalk. Zech. l. c. מרחבת.

רָחָב II

  • preced.) wide, broad. Midd. IV, 7 מה ארי צר … ור׳ מלפניו וכ׳ (not ורוחב) as the lion’s body is narrow behind and wide in front, so was the Temple &c.; a. fr.—נפש ר׳ (wide desire,) ambition, greed, opp. שפלה. Ab. V, 19; a. e.—יד ר׳, v. יָד.—Pl. רְחָבִים, רְחָבִין; רְחָבוֹת. Tanḥ. B’haʿăl. 5 שהיו ר׳ מבחוץ וכ׳ they (the Temple windows) were wide without &c., v. preced.; Tanḥ. T’tsav. 6; Num. R. s. 15, beg. Y. Sot. IX, 24ᵃ bot., v. צַר; a. fr.

רְחַב

  • , esp. (with or sub. נפשא) ambitious, greedy. Targ. Prov. XXVIII, 25 גברא ר׳ (Bxt. ר׳ נפשא; Ms. רעיינא, read: רחב עיינא or רחב רעיינא).

רֹחַב

  • preced. wds.) width. Midd. II, 6 אורך … על ר׳ וכ׳ one hundred and twenty-five cubits in length by eleven in width. Ib. IV, 1 ורָחְבּוֹ וכ׳ and its width was ten cubits. Tam. 29ᵇ; Shek. VIII, 5 ורָחְבָּהּ; a. fr.—Sifré Deut. 120 בר׳ יד with liberality.

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 2 distinct written forms H7338 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
רַ֭חַב Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute Job 36:16 1
רַחֲבֵי Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct Job 38:18 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7338, 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

Proper names from this root

People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.

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).

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