Hebrew word · H7190

קְשִׁי

keshi

stubbornness

Hardness, stubbornness. It comes from qashah, 'to be hard, severe, stiff'. This is the only occurrence of the noun in the Hebrew Bible.

Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

stubbornness, obstinacy

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

In depth

From the study of Deuteronomy 9:27

Range of meaning

Hardness, stubbornness. It comes from qashah, 'to be hard, severe, stiff'. This is the only occurrence of the noun in the Hebrew Bible.

Against the English

'Stubbornness' is accurate. What the English loses is the link to the bodily picture in the rest of the chapter, the 'hard-necked' or 'stiff-necked' people (qesheh-'oref, vv. 6, 13): an ox that stiffens its neck against the yoke.

Used elsewhere in the period

Tigay (JPS Torah Commentary) notes that the noun occurs only here. The related phrase 'stiff-necked' appears in Exod 32:9, 33:3, 5, 34:9 and Deut 9:6, 13, 31:27. The Septuagint renders it sklērotēs, 'hardness', which appears in the New Testament only at Rom 2:5 ('your hardness and unrepentant heart').

Where it appears

Deuteronomy · 1

  1. Deuteronomy 9:27 קְשִׁי֙ [the] stubbornness of

    Remember Your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Overlook the stubbornness of this people and the wickedness of their sin.

    Here: 'The hardness of'. This word occurs only here in the Hebrew Bible. It comes from the root 'hard' and echoes God's charge that Israel is 'hard of neck' (vv. 6, 13).

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