רָכַל
trader
‘trader’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7402 appears in the Book of Nehemiah — 3 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.
Nehemiah
- Nehemiah 3:31 וְ/הָ/רֹכְלִ֑ים conj + ptcl def.art + Qal ptcp.act mp After him repaired Malchijah one of the goldsmiths to the house of the Nethinim, and of the merchants, over against the gate of Hammiphkad, and to the ascent of the corner.
- Nehemiah 3:32 וְ/הָ/רֹכְלִֽים conj + ptcl def.art + Qal ptcp.act mp Between the ascent of the corner and the sheep gate repaired the goldsmiths and the merchants.
- Nehemiah 13:20 הָ/רֹכְלִ֜ים ptcl def.art + Qal ptcp.act mp So the merchants and sellers of all kind of wares lodged outside of Jerusalem once or twice.
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, רכל (râkal) means “trader.” Its uses cluster heavily in Ezekiel (60% of all occurrences). With 15 verses in 5 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at 1 Kings 10:15, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. 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 H7402 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 →
- 15
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,671
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,671 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 15 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 15 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 11 verses · 73%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 27%
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: Merchants 7×, They were thy merchants 3×, Were thy merchants 3×
- American Standard Version: Merchants 5×, They were thy traffickers 3×, Were thy traffickers 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Merchants 6×, Traded with you 3×, Merchant 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Merchants 4×, Traded 2×, Traders 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7402 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H7402 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H7402 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H7402 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- to go about (meaning dubious)
- (Qal) trafficker, trader (participle) (substantive)
Word origin
[ רָכַל ] vb. prob. go about, from one to another
— 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
Forms in the corpus
The 15 distinct written forms H7402 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| רֹֽכְלַ֔יִ/ךְ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:15 | 2 |
| רֹכְלָ֑יִ/ךְ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:17 | 2 |
| הָ/רֹכְלִ֑ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 10:15 | 1 |
| הָ/רֹכְלִ֜ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Nehemiah 13:20 | 1 |
| וְ/הָ/רֹכְלִ֑ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Nehemiah 3:31 | 1 |
| וְ/הָ/רֹכְלִֽים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Nehemiah 3:32 | 1 |
| רֹֽכְלָ֑יִ/ךְ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:13 | 1 |
| רֹֽכַלְתֵּ֔/ךְ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 27:20 | 1 |
| רֹכְלִ֖ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 17:4 | 1 |
| רֹכְלֵ֖י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:23 | 1 |
| רֹכְלֵ֤י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:22 | 1 |
| רֹכְלַ֨יִ/ךְ֙ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:24 | 1 |
| רֹכֶ֨לֶת֙ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 27:3 | 1 |
| רֹכַלְתֵּֽ/ךְ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 27:23 | 1 |
| רוֹכֵֽל | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Song of Solomon 3:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7402, 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
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 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 15 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.
