בּוּץ
fine linen
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
- 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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H948 appears in the Book of Esther — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Esther
- Esther 1:6 ב֣וּץ n c ms [There were hangings of] white [cloth], [of] green, and [of] blue, fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble: the couches were of gold and silver, on a pavement of red, and white, and yellow, and black marble.
- Esther 8:15 בּ֖וּץ n c ms Mordecai went forth from the presence of the king in royal clothing of blue and white, and with a great crown of gold, and with a robe of fine linen and purple: and the city of Shushan shouted and was glad.
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 בוץ centers on the idea of “fine linen.” Its earliest occurrence is 1 Chronicles 4:21. It appears 8 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to 2 Chronicles (38%), then 1 Chronicles and Esther. It clusters with ביצה, βυσσος and בץ under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H948 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 3 verses 38%
- 1 Chronicles 2 verses 25%
- Esther 2 verses 25%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 88%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 13%
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: Fine linen 7×
- American Standard Version: Fine linen 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fine linen 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fine linen 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H948 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H948 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H948 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H948 across 8 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.
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.
- byssus, a costly, fine white linen cloth made in Egypt
Word origin
n.[m.] byssus (late), (Ph. בוץ, Aramaic בּוּץ, ܒܘܽܨ; √ dub.; Birch, WilkinsonEgyptians ii. 158 f. from Egypt. hbos, clothe; v. Say Herodotii. 86; Thes from √ בוץ, but NöZMG 1875, 650; Armen., according to LagSem. i. 72 al.) a fine white Egyptian linen, and cloth made of it, מִשְׁפְּחוֹת בֵּית־עֲבֹדַת הַבֻּץ 1 Ch 4:21 families of the house of byssus-working; cf. 2 Ch 2:13; מְכֻרְבָּל בִּמְעִיל בּוּץ 1 Ch 15:27 clothed in a robe of byssus (but read rather as ‖ 2 S 6:14 מְכַרְכֵּר בְּכָל־עֹז was dancing with all his might); cf. תַּכְרִיךְ בּ׳ Est 8:15; מְלֻבָּשִׁים בּוּץ 2 Ch 5:12; חַבְלֵי בוּץ Est 1:6; 2 Ch 3:14 material of פָּרֹכֶת; article of trade Ez 27:16 (del. 𝔊 Co). Cf. also שֵׁשׁ.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root (of the same form) meaning to bleach, i.e. (intransitive) be white
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.
בּוּץ I
- (cmp. בּוּעַ) to swell, bubble, burst forth, shine. Pilp. בִּצְבֵּץ.
בּוּץ II
- v. preced.) linen, byssus. Yoma VII, 1 (68ᵇ sq.), v. בַּד IV; a. e.
בּוּץ
- 1. same. Targ. Esth. VIII, 15. Targ. Gen. XLI, 42; a. e.—Pl. בּוּצִין. Targ. Job XVIII, 13 Ms. Var. (ed. בּוּצְנִין) linen garments (h. text בַּדֵּי).
- 2. (v. בּוּצִין) wick. Targ. Is. XLII, 3; XLIII, 17 (Var. בוצין; h. text פשתה).
- 3. swamp, v. בִּצָּא.
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 7 distinct written forms H948 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בּ֗וּץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 15:27 | 2 |
| ב֣וּץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Esther 1:6 | 1 |
| בּ֖וּץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Esther 8:15 | 1 |
| הַ/בֻּ֖ץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 4:21 | 1 |
| וּ/ב֑וּץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 3:14 | 1 |
| וּ/בַ/בּ֣וּץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 2:14 | 1 |
| וּ/בוּץ֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 27:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H948, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
