רָתַק
to bind
‘to bind’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Niphal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Pual, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, 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 H7576 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
Ecclesiastes 1 verse
Nahum 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, רתק (râthaq) means “to bind.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. Its uses cluster heavily in Ecclesiastes (50% of all occurrences). First canonically at Ecclesiastes 12:6, it enters the text early. Read the stem: it spans 2 stems, including Pual and Niphal. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7576 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 50%
- Nahum 1 verse 50%
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Be loosed 1×, Were bound 1×
- American Standard Version: Is loosed 1×, Were bound 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Were bound 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Is removed 1×, Were bound 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7576 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7576 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7576 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7576 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Pual (the passive of Piel).
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.
Pual
- . her great ones were bound with fetters.
Niphal
- . from context = be snapped, broken
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
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.
רָתַק
- to join; (denom. מרתק, v. מַרְתּוֹקָא; knuckles, fist, whence:) רָתַק (cmp. סָטַר) to strike with the knuckles. Tosef. Zab. IV, 1 רוֹתְקוֹ ed. Zuck. (ed. התקו, corr. acc.) if he knuckles him, contrad. to תָּקַע.
- 1. to knock. Y. Ber. I, 2ᵈ bot. בא וה׳ על פתחו וכ׳ (not והרחיק) came and knocked at the king’s door. Ex. R. s. 33 (ref. to Cant. V, 2) אני ישנה … והקב"ה מַרְתִּיק עליו (not עלי) ‘I (Israel) was asleep’ after making the golden calf, but ‘my heart awoke’, when the Lord knocked at it, … ‘open unto me &c.’ Ex. R. s. 27 כשנגלה … שלא ה׳ עליה when the Lord revealed himself at Mount Sinai, there was not a nation at whose doors he did not knock, but they declined &c. Pesik. Aḥăré, p. 176ᵃ שאם יַרְתִּיק וכ׳ Ar. (ed. יְרַתֵּק Pi.) if he knocks, they will open for him (if he studies, he will enter into the interior of learning), if for Talmud &c.; Lev. R. s. 21 ירתק; a. e.—2) (with אחר) to shake the fist at, to rebel. Gen. R. s. 45 כל מי שה׳ אחר מדת הדין וכ׳ whosoever rebelled against divine justice, did not come out unscathed from under its hands. e.g. Song of Solomon 5:2
- to knock, v. supra.
- to be joined, welded. Cant. R. to IV, 4 (expl. מתאימות, ib.) אלו שתי … כמין שתים נִרְתָּקוֹת (not נרתיקות) this refers to the two cord-like chains of gold which came forth from the breast-plate, and which appeared like two welded together.
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 H7576 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יֵרָתֵק֙ | Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Ecclesiastes 12:6 | 1 |
| רֻתְּק֥וּ | Verb, Pual, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Nahum 3:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7576, 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 2 verses that also exist 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.
