רָכַס
to bind
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7405 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Exodus 2 verses
- Exodus 28:28 וְ/יִרְכְּס֣וּ conj + Qal impf 3mp They shall bind the breastplate by the rings of it to the rings of the ephod with a lace of blue, that it may be on the skillfully woven band of the ephod, and that the breastplate may not swing out from the ephod.
- Exodus 39:21 וַ/יִּרְכְּס֣וּ conj + Qal wimpf 3mp They bound the breastplate by its rings to the rings of the ephod with a lace of blue, that it might be on the skillfully woven band of the ephod, and that the breastplate might not come loose from the ephod, as Yahweh commanded Moses.
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.
“to bind” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb רכס (râkaç). It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Exodus. First canonically at Exodus 28:28, it enters the text early. Related forms include רכס and רכס. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7405 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.
- #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
- Exodus 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: They did bind 1×, They shall bind 1×
- American Standard Version: They did bind 1×, They shall bind 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Shall be tied 1×, They tied 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: They shall tie 1×, They tied 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7405 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7405 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7405 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7405 across 2 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.
- (Qal) to bind
Word origin
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.
רָכַס
- to stamp; (denom. of רֶכֶס) to make a ceiling of cement (v. מַעֲזִיבָה). Y’lamd. beg., quot. in Ar. אימתי ר׳ הקב"ה וכ׳ when did God form his upper stories with water as cement, v. רֶכֶס.—[b. h. רכס to fasten.]
- to stamp; esp. (of beasts) to pass over wetted grain; to husk (differ. fr. דּוּשׁ). B. Mets. 89ᵇ, sq. פרות המְרַכְּסוֹת בתבואה והדשות וכ׳ when cows stamp (secular) grain, or thresh corn of T’rumah &c.
- to cause to stamp, let (beasts) stamp. Tosef. ib. VIII, 10 המַרְכִּיס ed. Zuck. (Var. המְרַכֵּס Pi.); Y. Ter. IX, beg. 46ᶜ המרכין (corr. acc.).
רֶכֶס
- (רָכַס), pl. רְכָסִים walls of beaten earth. Ex. R. s. 15 בנה עליות לא … אלא ר׳ של מים the Lord did not build the upper stories with stones or with hewn blocks, but he made walls of stamped water; Tanḥ. Ḥayé 3 רְכָסִין של מים (not רכסיו).—[רכסים, Is. XL, 4, mounds, embankments, cmp. כֶּבֶשׁ.] e.g. Isaiah 40:4
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 H7405 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/יִרְכְּס֣וּ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Exodus 28:28 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּרְכְּס֣וּ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Exodus 39:21 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7405, 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 1 verse that also exists 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.
