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רֹךְ

tenderness

‘tenderness’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H7391 Strong's Hebrew
rôk Transliteration
/roke/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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.

“tenderness” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun רך (rôk). With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. Found nowhere else but Deuteronomy 28:56. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
tenderness
Modern gloss
tenderness
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 H7391 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Deuteronomy 28:56
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Deuteronomy 28:56.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 100%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • 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 1 distinct verse.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 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: Tenderness 1×
  • American Standard Version: Tenderness 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Gentle 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tenderness 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H7391 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Tenderness” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H7391 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Tenderness” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H7391 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Gentle” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H7391 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Tenderness” 1×

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.

  1. tenderness, delicacy
  2. of woman

Word origin

Derived from רכך (râkak) (H7401) — to be weak.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 2164b


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.

רַךְ I

  • to be soft, v. רְכַךְ.

רַךְ II

  • soft, tender. Men. 66ᵇ, a. e. רך (ו)מל, v. כַּרְמֶל. Ex. R. s. 1, a. e. (play on פרך, Ex. I, 13) בפה רך with soft (persuasive) speech. Gen. R. s. 90 (expl. א̇ב̇ר̇ך̇, Gen. XLI, 43) א̇ב̇ … ור̇ך̇ בשנים a father in wisdom, but tender of years. Keth. 46ᵃ (ref. to רכיל, Lev. XIX, 16) שלא יהא רך לזה וקשה לזה that the court should not be soft (lenient) to one and hard to another; Sifra K’dosh. Par. 2, ch. IV שלא תהיה רך דברים וכ׳ that thou be not soft of speech &c.; a. fr.—Pl. רַכִּים, רַכִּין Tosef. Shebi. II, 11; a. fr.—Fem. רַכָּה; pl. רַכּוֹת. Gen. R. s. 70 (ref. to Gen. XXIX, 17) ר׳ מבכיה her eyes had grown tender (sore) from weeping, v. רַכִּיךְ. e.g. Exodus 1:13

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.


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7391, 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 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.