רָקָב
rottenness
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
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.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7538 appears — 5 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.
Job 1 verse
Proverbs 2 verses
Hosea 1 verse
Habakkuk 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.
“rottenness” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun רקב (râqâb). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. More than a third of its appearances fall in Proverbs. Its earliest occurrence is Job 13:28. Related forms include רקב and רקבון. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7538 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 60%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 40%
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: Rottenness 3×
- American Standard Version: Rottenness 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Decay 1×, Is like decay 1×, Like decay 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: But 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7538 across 5 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 H7538 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H7538 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7538 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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.
- rottenness, decay (always figuratively)
Word origin
n.[m.] rottenness, decay (always fig.);—ר׳ abs.; appar. of ravages of worm, in בֵּית יְהוּדָה, in fig. Ho 5:12 (‖ עָשׁ), cf. Jb 13:28 (‖ id.); elsewhere of decay of bones, caries (in fig.), ר׳ בְּעַצְמ׳ Hb 3:16; Pr 12:4, cstr. רְקַב עַצְמ׳ 14:30.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רקב (râqab) (H7537) — to rot.
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.
רָקֵב I
- (next w.) rotten.—Pl. רְקֵבִים, רְקֵי׳. Gen. R. s. 84 שלכם ר׳ וכ׳ (I saw in my dream) your crops were rotten and mine preserved; Yalk. ib. 141 מַרְקִיבִים.
רָקֵב II
- (b. h.) [to be perforated, hollow; v. רוּקְבָּא II,] to be worm-eaten, rot, decay. Tosef. Ter. VI, 3 יִרְקְבוּ must be left to rot (cannot be used). Ib. 4 תרום ותִרְקוֹב separate the T’rumah, and let it rot; a. e.
- 1. same. Yalk. Gen. 141, v. preced. Tosef. Gitt. III, 2 same. Yalk. Gen. 141, v. preced. Tosef. Gitt. III, 2 ואיני חושש שמא הִרְקִיבָה תבואה and we need not take into consideration that the grain may have been attacked by worms. Ib. הלך ומצא שהִרְקִיבוּ if he went (to examine) and found that it was ruined הרי זה … עד שתַּרְקִיב וכ׳ he must take into consideration (the possibility of having consumed untithed grain) from the time that the grain may have begun to be attacked, or the wine to become sour. Ib. IX (VII), 12 נימוק או שהִירְקִיב if the document is decayed or worm-eaten. Y. Yoma VII, 44ᵇ bot. שם היו מַרְקִיבִין there they were allowed to rot; a. fr.—Esp. to turn into a lump of decayed matter (רָקָב). Naz. 51ᵇ טחנו וחזר וה׳ if he powdered the mass taken from the ground, and it turned again into a lump.
- 2. to cause to rot, to eat through. Deut. R. s. 2 ומַרְקִיבָן and eats them through, v. מָסַס.
- to be worm-eaten, rot. Gen. R. s. 91 גוזר … ונִרְקֶבֶת he decrees concerning the grain, and it is worm-eaten; (Yalk. ib. 148 ומַרְקֶבֶת, Hif.).
רְקֵב
- ; Ithpe. אִירְקִיב to become רָקָב (v. preced.Hif.). Naz. 51ᵃ, sq.
רָקָב
- preced.) rottenness, esp. raḳab, a mass of earth from a grave containing parts of a decayed human body, which causes uncleanness if of a certain quantity (תַּרְוָוד). Naz. VII, 2 מלא תרווד ר׳ a spoonful of raḳab. Tosef. Ohol. II, 2 מלא תרווד ר׳ שאמרו וכ׳ the spoonful of raḳab of which they speak (as making unclean) means as much as is grabbed with the fingers from their roots and upwards. Ib. 3 ואיזהו מת שיש לו ר׳ what corpse is it to which the law of raḳab applies?; Naz. 51ᵃ; Y. ib. VII, 56ᵇ bot.; a. fr.
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 5 distinct written forms H7538 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/כָ/רָקָ֖ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 5:12 | 1 |
| וּ/כְ/רָקָ֖ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 12:4 | 1 |
| וּ/רְקַ֖ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 14:30 | 1 |
| כְּ/רָקָ֣ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 13:28 | 1 |
| רָקָ֛ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Habakkuk 3:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7538, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
