רָצַע
to pierce
‘to pierce’ 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
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7527 appears — 1 distinct verse 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 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.
The Hebrew verb רצע centers on the idea of “to pierce.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. Exodus dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. It occurs only once, in Exodus 21:6. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7527 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.
- #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
- Exodus 1 verse 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 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: Shall bore 1×
- American Standard Version: Shall bore 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pierce 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Shall bore 1×, Through 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7527 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7527 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7527 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7527 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Qal) to bore, pierce
- of the ear
Word origin
רָצַע vb. bore, pierce;— Qal Ex 21:6 (E)
— 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
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.
רָצַע
- cmp. preced.)
- 1. to press, flatten; denom. רְצוּעָה.
- 2. to bore with the awl, esp. to perforate the ear of a Hebrew bondsman (according to Ex. XXI, 6). Kidd. 21ᵇ; Sifré Deut. 122 אין רוֹצְעִים וכ׳, v. מֵילַת; Bekh. 37ᵇ רוֹצְעִין; a. fr.—Part. pass. רָצוּעַ; f. רְצוּעָה; pl. רְצוּעִים; רְצוּעוֹת. Tosef. Bekh. V, 3; a. e. e.g. Exodus 21:6
- 3. (denom. of רְצוּעָה) to lash. Kidd. 70ᵃ אליהו כופתו והקב"ה רוֹצְעוֹ Elijah shall bind and the Lord lash him.
- to be perforated; (of the Hebrew bondsman) to have the ear bored through. Ib. 21ᵇ אין … כהן נ׳ וכ׳ a bondsman priest must not have his ear bored through, because it would unfit him for priestly service. Ib. I, 2 הנִרְצָע וכ׳, v. רְצִיעָה. Ib. 14ᵇ המוכר עצמו אינו נ׳ he that sells himself need not undergo the operation of boring (in order to prolong his service); a. fr.
- to lash. Tosef. Sot. XV, 7 מסרוהו לרוצען ורִיצְּעוֹ (ed. Zuck. incorr.) they handed him over to the strap-bearer, and he attempted to lash him; (Y. ib. IX, 24ᵇ top לבעל הרצועה וסטרו).
רְצַע
- Af. אַרְצַע same, to bore through. Targ. O. Ex. XXI, 6.
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 H7527, 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 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.
