בֶּ֫זֶק
Bezek
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Bezek’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H966 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Judges 2 verses
- Judges 1:4 בְּ/בֶ֔זֶק prep + n Proper Judah went up; and Yahweh delivered the Canaanites and the Perizzites into their hand: and they struck of them in Bezek ten thousand men.
- Judges 1:5 בְּ/בֶ֔זֶק prep + n Proper They found Adoni-bezek in Bezek; and they fought against him, and they struck the Canaanites and the Perizzites.
1 Samuel 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.
The Hebrew name בזק centers on the idea of “Bezek.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Judges (67%), then 1 Samuel. Its earliest occurrence is Judges 1:4. For the data behind this summary, explore 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H966 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Bezek 3×
- American Standard Version: Bezek 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bezek 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bezek 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H966 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H966 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H966 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H966 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.
- Bezek = "lightning"
- the home of Adonibezek, the place where Israel rallied under Saul
Word origin
בֶּ֫זֶק n.pr.loc. rendezvous of Israel under Saul and Sam.; home of Adoni-Bezek
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בזק (bâzâq) (H965) — lightning.
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.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H966 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/בֶ֔זֶק | Noun, Proper | Judges 1:4 | 2 |
| בְּ/בָ֑זֶק | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 11:8 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Bezek). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Lightning. (1.) The residence of Adoni-bezek, in the lot of Judah (Judg. 1:5). It was in the mountains, not far from Jerusalem. Probably the modern Bezkah, 6 miles south-east of Lydda.
(2.) The place where Saul numbered the forces of Israel and Judah (1 Sam. 11:8); somewhere in the centre of the country, near the Jordan valley. Probably the modern Ibzik, 13 miles north-east of Shechem.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(lightning).
+ The residence of Adonibezek, (Judges 1:6) in the lot of Judah. ver. (Judges 1:3) + Where Saul numbered the forces of Israel and Judah before going to the relief of Jabesh-gilead. (1 Samuel 11:8) This was doubtless somewhere in the centre of the country, near the Jordan valley. No identification of either place has been made in modern times.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
lightning; in the chains
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 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.
