רָקִיעַ
firmament
also: extended surface, expanse fuller range ↓
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
- 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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
5 distinct verses where H7549 appears in the Construct state, across 2 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Genesis 4 verses
- Genesis 1:14 בִּ/רְקִ֣יעַ prep + n c ms cs God said, "Let there be lights in the expanse of sky to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years;
- Genesis 1:15 בִּ/רְקִ֣יעַ prep + n c ms cs and let them be for lights in the expanse of sky to give light on the earth," and it was so.
- Genesis 1:17 בִּ/רְקִ֣יעַ prep + n c ms cs God set them in the expanse of sky to give light to the earth,
- Genesis 1:20 רְקִ֥יעַ n c ms cs God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of sky."
Psalms 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 noun רקיע centers on the idea of “firmament.” Its English rendering has broadened — “firmament” classically, “expanse” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. Spanning 15 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Genesis dominates its distribution — 7 of 15 verses. Beyond “firmament” it also covers “extended surface” and “expanse” — see its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7549 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 7 verses · 47%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 20%
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: Firmament 14×
- American Standard Version: Firmament 12×
- Berean Standard Bible: Expanse 12×, Heavens 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Expanse 5×, Dome 4×, Expanse of 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7549 across 17 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7549 across 16 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 H7549 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7549 across 18 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 the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. (flat) expanse (as if of ice, cf. כְּעֵין הַקֶרַח), as base, support (WklAltor. Forsch. iv. 347) Ez 1:22, 23, 25 (gloss? cf. Co Toy), v 26 (supporting י׳’sthrone) 10:1. Hence (Co Ez 1:22) e.g. Ezekiel 1:22
- 2. the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it, Gn 1:6, 7(×3), 8 (called שָׁמַיִם; all P), ψ 19:2 (‖ הַשָּׁמַיִם), זֹהַר הָר׳ Dn 12:3; also הַשָּׁמַיִם ר׳ Gn 1:14, 15, 17, עַל־פְּנֵי ר׳ הַשּׁ׳ v 20 (all P).* e.g. Genesis 1:6
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.m. Gn 1:6 extended surface, (solid) expanse (as if beaten out; cf. Jb 37:18);—abs. ר׳ Ez 1:22 +, cstr. רְ׳ Gn 1:14 +;—𝔊 στερέωμα, 𝔙 firmamentum, cf. Syriac sub √ supr.;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רקע (râqaʻ) (H7554) — to beat out.
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.
רַקִּיעַ
- , v. רְּקוֹע
רָקִיעַ
- expanse, sky, esp. Raḳiʿa, name of one of the seven heavens. Pes. 94ᵃ, sq. Gen. R. s. 4. Gen. R. s. 38.—Ḥag. 12ᵇ; a. fr.—Pl. רְקִיעִים. Ib.
רְקִיעַ
- Targ. Gen. I, 6, sq.; a. fr.—Ber. 58ᵇ the Curtain (וִילוֹן) is rolled up, ומתחזי נהורא דר׳ and the light of the Raḳi‘a is seen. Ib.ᵃ, v. מַלְכוּתָא. Pes. 94ᵃ סומכא דר׳ the thickness (depth) of the sky; a. fr.—Pl. רְקִיעִין. Targ. Y. I Num. XXIV, 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.
Forms in the corpus
The 15 distinct written forms H7549 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7549, 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 15 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.
