רָפֶה
slack
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (50%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (25%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7504 appears — 4 distinct verses across 4 books. 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.
Numbers 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
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, רפה (râpheh) means “slack.” It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Numbers (25%), then 2 Samuel and Job. Scripture first uses it in Numbers 13:18. It shares a root with רפה, רפיון and רפת. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7504 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 50%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 25%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 25%
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: Weak 2×
- American Standard Version: Weak 1×, Weak-handed 1×, Whether they are strong or weak 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Feeble 1×, Is weak 1×, Limp 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Weak 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7504 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H7504 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7504 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7504 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 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.
- slack
Word origin
Derived from רפה (râphâh) (H7503) — to relax.
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.
רָפָה
- , v. רפי
רָפֶה
- preced.) lax, loose. Gen. R. s. 100 מיד היא ר׳ it (the threatening sword of death) becomes at once loose (in the hands of the angel); a. e.—שפה ר׳, v. שָׂפָה.—Pl. רָפִים, רָפִין; רָפוֹת. Lev. R. s. 19 (ref. to Is. XXXV, 3) ידים … כאילו ר׳ the hands (of God) which appear as if they were lax; a. e. e.g. Isaiah 35:3
רפי ²
- preced.) to be or make lax. Lev. R. s. 19 רָפוּ ידיהן their hands became lax (they lost their energy).—Part. pass. רָפוּי; f. רְפוּיָה. Sabb. 141ᵇ בר׳ when the shoe on the block is loose (can be taken off without moving the block). Ib. 130ᵃ, v. infra.
- 1. to loosen, let go. Mikv. VIII, 5 יְרַפֶּה כדי וכ׳ he must loosen his hold of the objects, so that the water can come in contact with them; Y. Ḥag. III, beg. 78ᵈ יְרַפֵּם עד וכ׳ he must let them go until &c.
- 2. to let hang down; to make lax, weaken. Tanḥ. K’dosh. 6 מְרַפִּין כנפיהם they let their wings hang down. Lev. R. l. c. (ref. to Is. XXXV, 3) שרִפִּיתֶם עצמיכם וכ׳ you weakened yourselves through your evil doings. Bekh. 5ᵇ; Snh. 106ᵃ (play on ר̇פ̇י̇ד̇י̇ם̇) שרִֹיפּ֗וּ י̇ד̇יהן מדברי תורה (not עצמן) they let their hands drop from (holding) the words of the Law; Tanḥ. B’shall. 25 שרִפּוּ ידיהן מן התורה (or שרָפוּ, v. supra); a. e.—Part. pass. מְרוּפּה; f. מְרוּפָּה. Sabb. 130ᵃ עדיין היא מר׳ בידם (not הוא; Ms. O. רְפוּיָה) it is still lax in their hands (they treat the ceremony with laxity), opp. מוחזקת held fast.—3) to soften, teach good manners. Ruth R. to II, 5 רבתה רִפְּתָה לה (or רָפְתָה) her mistress (Naomi) had taught her good manners; Yalk. ib. 601 חמותה מאלפא לה. e.g. Isaiah 35:3
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 4 distinct written forms H7504 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הֲ/רָפֶ֔ה | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 13:18 | 1 |
| וּ/רְפֵ֣ה | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 17:2 | 1 |
| רָפ֑וֹת | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 35:3 | 1 |
| רָפ֣וֹת | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Job 4:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7504, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
