שָׁגַח
to gaze
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
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”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7688 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Song of Solomon 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.
“to gaze” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb שגח (shâgach). With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It concentrates in Psalms, which alone accounts for 33% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is Psalms 33:14. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7688 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 1 verse 33%
- Song of Solomon 1 verse 33%
- Isaiah 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 67%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
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: He looketh 1×, He looketh forth 1×, Thee shall narrowly look 1×
- American Standard Version: He looketh 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gazing 1×, He gazes 1×, Will stare 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gazing 1×, He gazes 1×, Will stare 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7688 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7688 across 3 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7688 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7688 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Hiphil) to gaze, stare
Word origin
[ שָׁגַח ] vb. Hiph. gaze
— 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.
שָׁגַח
- to be bright.
- (cmp. נָבַט, Hif.)
- 1. (with ב) to look at; to consider. Bets. III, 6 אין מַשְׁגִּיחִין בכף וכ׳ you must not look at the scales at all, i.e. on the Holy Day you dare not use the scales at all, even if you employ some substitute for weights; Y. ib. 62ᵃ bot.; Tosef. ib. III, 5. Ber. 52ᵃ אין משגיחין בבת קול we do not consider a voice from on high, i.e. we are not guided in our decisions by a bath ḳol (v. בַּת I); a. e.
- 2. (with על) to look for, care for, mind. Y. Keth. VIII, 3ᵇ bot. ואין ברייה מַשְׁגַּחַת עליה and nobody will care for her (to assist her in her bereavement). Ber. 34ᵇ לא היו מַשְׁגִּיחִים עליו they would have paid no attention to his prayers. Snh. 99ᵃ כל מי שאינו מַשְׁגִּיחַ על המשנה he who disregards the Mishnah; a. fr.
שְׁגַח
- Af. אַשְׁגַּח same,
- 1. to look. Targ. Cant. II, 9.
- 2. to care for, mind. Targ. Job XXII, 2; a. e.—Y. B. Bath. V, beg. 15ᵃ בשדה בור דלא מַשְׁגַּח עליה in the case of an uncultivated field, about which the owner does not care (if people gather its spontaneous growth). Y. Snh. III, 21ᶜ top, גְּסַס. Ib. VI, 23ᵈ bot. מַשְׁגְּחִין רבנן מימר וכ׳ would the rabbis (you) mind to say a word of the Law? אמרו ליה א׳ מרן said they to him, would you mind? Y. Nidd. II, end, 50ᵇ מאי חמא רבי משגח עלינן וכ׳ what reason had the master (you) to care for us (consult our opinion) this day? Succ. 31ᵃ ולא א׳ בה, v. צְוַוח. Ib. ולא אַשְׁגְּחִיתוּ בה and you pay no attention to her? Gen. R. s. 32 לא א׳ ביה קרייה ולא אחשביה כלום the Biblical text paid no attention to it and did not consider it at all; Cant. R. to IV, 4 ולא א׳ ביה עילוי קרייה (strike out עילוי); 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 3 distinct written forms H7688 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הִשְׁגִּ֑יחַ | Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 33:14 | 1 |
| יַשְׁגִּ֔יחוּ | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Isaiah 14:16 | 1 |
| מַשְׁגִּ֨יחַ֙ | Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Song of Solomon 2:9 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
