בּוּךְ
to confuse
‘to confuse’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
Form
- 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
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, 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 H943 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Esther 1 verse
Joel 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, בוך (bûwk) means “to confuse.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. The word gravitates to Exodus (33%), then Esther and Joel. Scripture first uses it in Exodus 14:3. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H943 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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Are perplexed 1×, They are entangled 1×, Was perplexed 1×
- American Standard Version: Are perplexed 1×, They are entangled 1×, Was perplexed 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Confusion 1×, Wander in confusion 1×, Was in confusion 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are confused 1×, Are perplexed 1×, Was in confusion 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H943 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H943 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H943 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H943 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- to perplex, confuse, be confused
- (Niphal) to be confused, be in confusion
Word origin
בּוּךְ vb. perplex, confuse —only Niph.;— be confused, in confusion
— 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.
בּוּךְ
- (b. h.; √בו or בה, v. בהי, בהל)to run to and fro, be agitated. Part. בָּיֵיךְ, f. בָּיְיכָא. Gen. R. s. 87, beg. (expl. הומיה וכ׳ Prov. VII, 11) בייכא היא וטעיא Ar. (ed. שגשיא; Yalk. Prov. 940 בוכה, corr. acc.) she runs about (revelling) &c. Y. Taan. II, 65ᵇ (ref. to Mic. VII, 4) (read:) מן גו דא אנן בָּיְיכִין ובכון וכ׳ therefore we are now in trouble. And they wept &c. Ruth. R. s. 3 (before I, 18) קל ברייתא בייבין (read בייכין) the sound of people runing in excitement (on business). e.g. Proverbs 7:11
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 H943 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נְבֻכִ֥ים | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 14:3 | 1 |
| נָבֹ֨כוּ֙ | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Joel 1:18 | 1 |
| נָבֽוֹכָה | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Esther 3:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H943, 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 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.
