Emerald
נֹ֫פֶךְStrong’s H5306nophekh (no-phekh)
Appears in 4 verses of the Old Testament
In short
Nophekh is the Hebrew word usually translated “turquoise”. It appears in 4 verses of the Old Testament.
“And the second row shall be an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.”
Meaning
- A precious stone in the high priest's breastplateperhaps an emerald, turquoise, ruby, or carbuncle
- Jewels imported from Tyre
How it's translated
- a turquoise 2
- for turquoise 1
- turquoise 1
Word-by-word English from the STEPBible tagged text.
Where it's used most
- Exodus 2
- Ezekiel 2
2 books in all.
Explore in Scripture
- Exodus 39:11And the second row, an emerald, a sapphire, and a diamond.
- Ezekiel 27:16Syria was thy merchant by reason of the multitude of the wares of thy making: they occupied in thy fairs with emeralds, purple, and broidered work, and fine linen, and coral, and agate.
- Ezekiel 28:13Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tabrets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.
Hebrew dictionary
נֹ֫פֶךְ nophekh · emerald
1) a precious stone in the high priest's breastplate 1a) perhaps an emerald, turquoise, ruby, or carbuncle 2) jewels imported from Tyre
From STEPBible’s Hebrew lexicon (based on Brown-Driver-Briggs).
Webster's 1828 Dictionary
How the English word “emerald” was understood when the King James Version was still the common Bible of English readers.
EM'ERALD, noun
[Latin smaragdus.]
A mineral and a precious stone, whose colors are a pure, lively green, varying to a pale, yellowish, bluish, or grass green. It is always crystallized, and almost always appears in regular, hexahedral prisms, more or less perfect, and sometimes slightly modified by truncations on the edges, or on the solid angles. It is a little harder than quartz, becomes electric by friction, is often transparent, sometimes only translucent, and before the blowpipe is fusible into a whitish enamel or glass. The finest emeralds have been found in Peru.
Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828). Verse references are checked against the KJV. Read the full entry.
Verses are from the King James Version. Word meanings come from the original Hebrew, not from any one translation.