Hebrew word · H6594

פִּשְׁתָּה

vehapishtah

flax

Flax, the plant and its fibre (linen). By extension, a lamp wick made of twisted flax fibre.

Appears 4 times in 3 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. · Updated October 23, 2026

What it means

1) flax

1a) flax (of the plant)

1b) as wick for lamp

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: Flax, the plant and its fibre (linen). By extension, a lamp wick made of twisted flax fibre.
Against the English: KJV "tow" (the coarse, broken fibre of flax or hemp), YLT "flax"; modern versions "wick." "Wick" gives the right picture. "Tow" is now obscure to most readers.
How it drifted: "Tow" was an everyday word in 1611 for raw flax fibre. Most modern readers no longer know it.
Used elsewhere in the period: Exodus 9:31 (flax crop struck in Egypt); Joshua 2:6 (stalks of flax on Rahab's roof); Isaiah 42:3 (pishtāh kēhāh, "a faint wick"). Clay oil lamps with a flax or linen wick were in every Israelite house.

Exodus · 2

Exodus 9:31 וְהַפִּשְׁתָּ֥ה וְהַפִּשְׁתָּ֖ה and the flax

(Now the flax and barley were destroyed, since the barley was ripe and the flax was in bloom;

Isaiah · 2

Isaiah 42:3 וּפִשְׁתָּ֥ה and a wick

A bruised reed He will not break and a smoldering wick He will not extinguish; He will faithfully bring forth justice.

Here: Flax fibre twisted into the wick of a clay oil lamp. 'Flax' here means the household wick, not a field crop. The same word appears in Isa 43:17, where Pharaoh's army is 'quenched like a wick'.
Isaiah 43:17 כַּפִּשְׁתָּ֥ה like <the> wick

who brings out the chariots and horses, the armies and warriors together, to lie down, never to rise again; to be extinguished, snuffed out like a wick:

Here: Flax, and so a wick made of twisted flax or linen fibre lying in a clay oil lamp. A thing that small and that easily snuffed is set against the most fearsome army on earth.

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