בָּזָק
lightning
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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 H965 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Ezekiel 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, בזק (bâzâq) means “lightning.” It occurs a mere 1 verse across Scripture. The word gravitates to Ezekiel (100%). It occurs only once, in Ezekiel 1:14. It shares a root with בזק. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H965 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezekiel 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Flash of lightning 1×
- American Standard Version: Flash of lightning 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Flashes of lightning 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lightning 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H965 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H965 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H965 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H965 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- lightning, lightning flash
Word origin
בָּזָק n.[m.] lightning flash ? Ez 1:14
— 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 meaning to lighten
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.
בָּזָק
- v. next w.) [shattering, splitting,] lightning. Y. B. Mets. V, 11ᵃ top (citing the Mishnah) והִבְרִיקָהּ הַבָּ׳ [not דב׳] and lightning struck her (affecting her feet, v. אַבְזָקַת).
בָּזַק
- (√בז, v. בזי II; cmp. בדק) to break, crush. Erub. X, 14 (104ᵃ) בֹּוזְקִין מלח וכ׳ you may crush salt (lumps) on the steps (that the priests should not slip). Gen. R. s. 50, beg. (expl. כמראה הבזק, Ezek. I, 14) כזה שהוא בוזק וכ׳ as one who crushes pieces of peat in the stove (when the flames break forth). e.g. Ezekiel 1:14
- (cmp. בָּזָק) to be split in flashes, to flash (used of the divine spirit). Gen. R. s. 26 הרוח היא נִבְזֶקֶת וכ׳ the spirit flashes in (seizes) one of man’s limbs, … בכל הגוף the entire body.
בְּזַק
- —Pa. בַּזֵּק to cast (or shoot) a mass of fragments (as from a catapult). Snh. 108ᵇ ב׳ בהון עפרא וכ׳ Ar. (ed. והוה שדינן) he shot at them with dust and it turned into swords &c. *B. Bath. 73ᵃ והוה כי מבזק ארבעין גירוי דברזלא and there was a flash as if one shot forty arrows of iron (v. Koh. Ar. Compl. s. v. בזק, note 5).—Ed. כי מבזר ארב׳ גריוי דחרדלא like one scattering forty measures of mustard [from a confusion of which two versions the variants in Mss. a. in Ar. arose, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note.—Ar. כמיבזק Ithpe.].
- to be broken. Yoma 22ᵇ how do you know that Bazek (I Sam. XI, 8, v. next w.) is here used לישנא דמיבזיק in the sense of being broken (a fragment of pottery); perhaps it is the name of a place? B. Bath. 73ᵃ Ar., v. supra. e.g. 1 Samuel 11:8
בֶּזֶק
- (preced.) fragment, piece of pottery, pebble (testa). Yoma 22ᵇ, v. preced. Tanḥ. Ki Thissa 9 ומהו ב׳ וכ׳ what is bezek? Answ. he took a pebble &c.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H965, 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.
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
