Hebrew word · H4881

מְשֻׂכָּה

mesukato

hedge

A hedge or barrier made of thorny brush. It comes from the verb sukh / sakhakh, 'to fence in, screen'.

Appears 2 times in 2 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. · Updated October 30, 2026

What it means

hedge

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

Range of meaning: A hedge or barrier made of thorny brush. It comes from the verb sukh / sakhakh, 'to fence in, screen'. The cognate verb appears in Hos 2:6 (Heb 2:8), 'I will hedge up her way with thorns', and Job 1:10, 'Have you not put a hedge around him?' The closely related form in Prov 15:19 is explicitly 'a hedge of thorns' (mesukat chedeq).
Against the English: 'Hedge' is accurate, but today's reader may picture a trimmed ornamental shrub border. The Hebrew means a defensive thorn barrier, closer to barbed wire than to a garden feature.
How it drifted: Modern 'hedge' calls up suburban landscaping. Ancient field hedges were protective thornbrush. The protective sense survives in English only in phrases like 'hedge against'.
Used elsewhere in the period: Prov 15:19 (thorn hedge); related verb in Job 1:10, Hos 2:6. The LXX renders it phragmos, 'fence', the same word Jesus uses in the parable of the tenants (Mark 12:1; Matt 21:33), which is built on Isa 5:1–2.

Range of meaning: A hedge or barrier fence, from a root meaning 'to fence in, hedge about' (spelled both śwk and swk). Used of the protective hedge around a vineyard (Isaiah 5:5) and as an image of something prickly and hard to get through (Micah 7:4).
Against the English: BSB, KJV, ESV, NASB keep the noun: 'a hedge of thorns'. NIV and NLT turn it into a result, 'blocked with thorns/briers', which makes the meaning clear but loses the picture of a road that has itself become a fence.
Used elsewhere in the period: Hosea 2:6 (Hebrew 2:8) uses the same root with the same word for 'way': 'I will hedge up your way with thorns', where God blocks Israel's road. Micah 7:4 pairs this word with ḥedeq, the same briar as here: 'the best of them is like a briar, the most upright worse than a thorn hedge.' Job 3:23 and 1:10 use the root for being 'hedged in' by God.

Proverbs · 1

Proverbs 15:19 כִּמְשֻׂ֣כַת [is] like a hedge of

The way of the slacker is like a hedge of thorns, but the path of the upright is a highway.

Here: 'Like' plus a word for a hedge or barrier fence made of brushwood or thorny growth, the kind used to fence a vineyard (Isaiah 5:5). His road looks like a thorn fence: something you cannot walk along, only push through.

Isaiah · 1

Isaiah 5:5 מְשׂוּכָּתוֹ֙ hedge its

Now I will tell you what I am about to do to My vineyard: I will take away its hedge, and it will be consumed; I will tear down its wall, and it will be trampled.

Here: 'Its hedge': a barrier of thorny brush planted or piled around the vineyard to keep out animals and thieves. Its removal leaves the plants open to every passing mouth.

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.