בָּכַר
ba.khar
to be/bear firstborn
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# Analysis of בָּכַר (bakhar) The Hebrew verb בָּכַר carries the basic meaning "to be" or "to bear [as] firstborn," establishing its semantic field around primogeniture and the status of being firstborn. With only four biblical occurrences, this is a relatively rare term, suggesting it occupied a specialized rather than everyday role in biblical Hebrew vocabulary. The rarity of this verb—appearing just four times across the entire biblical corpus—indicates that the concept of firstborn status, while culturally significant, did not require frequent verbal expression in biblical texts. The verb's narrow usage pattern suggests that biblical writers either preferred alternative expressions or that the actual need to express the action of "being/bearing firstborn" arose infrequently. This contrasts with the much more common noun בְּכוֹר (bekhor, "firstborn"), which appears substantially more often, indicating that the status itself was frequently referenced even if the verb form was not. Without access to the specific biblical passages where this verb appears, the definition alone establishes that בָּכַר functioned as a specialized term for expressing firstborn identity or origin. Its limited attestation suggests that understanding biblical concepts of primogeniture and inheritance rights—topics of considerable importance in ancient Near Eastern culture—would have been communicated through other linguistic means or contextual inference rather than through the active use of this particular
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
4 total occurrences across the text
For I have heard a voice as of a woman in travail, the anguish as of her who gives birth to her first child, the voice of the daughter of Zion, who gasps for breath, who spreads her hands, saying, “Woe is me now! For my soul faints before the murderers.”
Ezekiel 47:12By the river on its bank, on this side and on that side, will grow every tree for food, whose leaf won’t wither, neither will its fruit fail. It will produce new fruit every month, because its waters issue out of the sanctuary. Its fruit will be for food, and its leaf for healing.”
Leviticus 27:26“ ‘However the firstborn among animals, which belongs to Yahweh as a firstborn, no man may dedicate, whether an ox or a sheep. It is Yahweh’s.
Deuteronomy 21:16then it shall be, in the day that he causes his sons to inherit that which he has, that he may not give the son of the beloved the rights of the firstborn before the son of the hated, who is the firstborn;