בַחוּן
ba.chin
tower
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# Bachin (בַחוּן): A Rare Hebrew Term for Tower Based on the lexical data, *bachin* is a Hebrew noun meaning "tower" that appears only once in the biblical text. Its singular occurrence in the biblical corpus makes it a hapax legomenon—a word that appears exactly one time—which limits our ability to establish broad patterns of usage or semantic range through biblical context alone. The rarity of this term presents an interpretive challenge. With only one attestation, we cannot determine whether *bachin* was a common architectural term that fell out of use, a specialized or regional designation for a particular type of tower structure, or a poetic or archaic variant of other Hebrew words for towers (such as *migdal*). The single occurrence provides minimal context for understanding whether the word carried specific connotations about the tower's size, function, or construction that might distinguish it from other tower terminology in biblical Hebrew. For general readers, *bachin* exemplifies how biblical Hebrew contained vocabulary that was used sparingly or in specific contexts, reminding us that our complete understanding of ancient Hebrew terminology is necessarily limited by the surviving textual record.
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
1 total occurrence across the text