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בִּגְוַי

Bigvai

BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Bigvai’ fuller range ↓

H902 Strong's Hebrew
Bigvay Transliteration
/big-vah'ee/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 6 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

בגוי — transliterated Bigvay — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Bigvai.” Its uses cluster heavily in Ezra (50% of all occurrences). With 6 verses in 2 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Ezra 2:2. See 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Bigvai
Modern gloss
Bigvai
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H902 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 →

6
distinct verses
The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ezra 2:2
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Ezra 2:2.
Nehemiah 10:16
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Nehemiah 10:16.
#3,040
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 6 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 6 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 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: Bigvai 6×
  • American Standard Version: Bigvai 6×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Bigvai 6×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bigvai 6×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H902 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bigvai” 6×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H902 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bigvai” 6×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H902 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bigvai” 6×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H902 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Bigvai” 6×

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. a companion of Zerubbabel Ezr 2:2 = Ne 7:7; perhaps = head of a family of returning exiles Ezr 2:14 (בִּגְוָ֑י) = Ne 7:19, cf. Ezr 8:14. e.g. Ezra 2:2
  • 2. a chief of the people in Nehemiah’s time Ne 10:17; cf. SmListen 13. e.g. Nehemiah 10:17

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.pr.m. (cf. Skr. bhagavân, happy?)

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Origin: probably of foreign origin

Part of speech: Proper Name Masculine


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.

גּוֹי

  • crowd, people, nation; pl. גּוֹיִם gentiles, fr. which גּוֹי = נָכְרִי or עכו"ם, gentile, idolator. Tosef. Ab. Zar. III, 4 sq.; Y. ib. IV, 41ᵃ top contrad. to כותי (Bab. ib. 29ᵃ נכרי); a. v. fr.—Pl. גּוֹיִים, גּוֹיִם. Ab. Zar. I, 1 sq. in Y. ed. ג׳ (Bab. ed. נכרים, עכו"ם, Mish. עכומ"ז, נכרים indiscriminately); a. v. fr.—Fem. גּוֹיָה gentile woman. Y. Yeb. II, 4ᵃ top ואין בנך מן הג׳ וכ׳ thy son from a gentile is not called thy son but her son (Bab. ib. 23ᵃ נכרית); a. fr.—Pl. גּוֹיוֹת. Y. ib. IV, 6ᵃ bot. [Y. Gitt. I, 43ᵇ top, a. e. גויים לוקין, v. גַּיּוּס.]

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 H902 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
בִגְוַ֖י Noun, Proper Ezra 8:14 2
בִגְוָ֔י Noun, Proper Ezra 2:14 2
בִּגְוַ֖י Noun, Proper Ezra 2:2 2

Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Bigvai). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

(happy).

+ "Children of Bigvai," 2056 (Neh. 2067) in number, returned from the captivity with Zerubbabel, (Ezra 2:14; Nehemiah 7:19) and 72 of them at a later date with Ezra. (Ezra 8:14) (B.C. 536.) + Apparently one of the chiefs of Zerubbabel's expedition, (Ezra 2:2; Nehemiah 7:7) whose family afterwards signed the covenant. (Nehemiah 10:16) (B.C. 410.)

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

in my body

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.