תִּיכוֹן
ti.khon
middle
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# תִּיכוֹן (tikhon): The Hebrew Word for "Middle" The Hebrew word תִּיכוֹן (tikhon) denotes "middle" and appears 11 times throughout the biblical text. This relatively modest frequency suggests it served a specific rather than universal function in biblical Hebrew vocabulary. The word's consistent definition indicates a stable semantic field: it refers to the central position or intermediate location between extremes, whether spatial, temporal, or relational. Given its limited occurrences, tikhon functioned as a precise descriptive term when biblical writers needed to identify a central or medial position. Rather than being a common everyday word, it appears to have been employed in contexts where the "middle" held particular significance—whether describing physical locations, divisions of time, or intermediate relationships. This specialized usage pattern distinguishes it from more frequently occurring spatial prepositions or directional terms in biblical Hebrew. The 11 biblical instances establish tikhon as a functional but non-essential vocabulary item, suggesting that Hebrew speakers could communicate spatial and positional concepts without relying heavily on this particular word. Its presence in the biblical corpus demonstrates, however, that ancient Hebrew possessed a distinct lexical option for explicitly denoting "middle" when such specificity served the writer's communicative purpose.
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
11 total occurrences across the text
The side rooms were wider on the higher levels, because the walls were narrower at the higher levels. Therefore the width of the house increased upward; and so one went up from the lowest level to the highest through the middle level.
Ezekiel 42:5Now the upper rooms were shorter; for the galleries took away from these, more than from the lower and the middle, in the building.
Ezekiel 42:6For they were in three stories, and they didn’t have pillars as the pillars of the courts. Therefore the uppermost was set back more than the lowest and the middle from the ground.
Exodus 26:28The middle bar in the middle of the boards shall pass through from end to end.
Exodus 36:33He made the middle bar to pass through in the middle of the boards from the one end to the other.
Judges 7:19So Gideon and the hundred men who were with him came to the outermost part of the camp in the beginning of the middle watch, when they had but newly set the watch. Then they blew the trumpets and broke in pieces the pitchers that were in their hands.
1 Kings 6:6The lowest floor was five cubits wide, and the middle was six cubits wide, and the third was seven cubits wide; for on the outside he made offsets in the wall of the house all around, that the beams should not be inserted into the walls of the house.
1 Kings 6:8The door for the middle side rooms was in the right side of the house. They went up by winding stairs into the middle floor, and out of the middle into the third.
1 Kings 6:8The door for the middle side rooms was in the right side of the house. They went up by winding stairs into the middle floor, and out of the middle into the third.
1 Kings 6:8The door for the middle side rooms was in the right side of the house. They went up by winding stairs into the middle floor, and out of the middle into the third.
2 Kings 20:4Before Isaiah had gone out into the middle part of the city, Yahweh’s word came to him, saying,