StrongerBible

baqqashah

בַּקָּשָׁה

HebrewH1246“request, petition”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Ezr 7:6Est 5:3Est 5:6Est 5:7Est 5:8Est 7:2Est 7:3Est 9:12
Root family
Word studybah-kah-SHAHnoun

What baqqashah means

a request laid before a king: the particular thing a petitioner is after, asked with the expectation that it will be granted.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This noun belongs to the common verb בָּקַשׁ, "to seek." The verb covers seeking of every kind, from hunting for a lost donkey to searching for God. The noun narrows all of that to one situation: what a person is seeking from someone with the power to hand it over. In all eight of its verses that someone is a king, and in every case the request is granted.

Seven of the eight are in Esther, where the word forms half of a court formula. The king asks twice over, "What is your petition?" and "What is your request?", and Esther answers in the same doubled shape. The first noun (שְׁאֵלָה) names the appeal she is presenting; this one points to what she is actually after. In Esther 7:3 she finally separates them, asking for her own life with the first word and for her people with the second.

The eighth verse, Ezra 7:6, shows the other side of the transaction: the king "granted him all his request." What is given is no longer the wording of an appeal but everything Ezra asked for. Once a request is answered, the asking and the thing received become one and the same.

This is a late word. It shows up only in books set in the Persian empire, and it carries the flavor of that world: a subject standing before a throne, a formal audience, an answer that is expected to be yes.

Ezr 7:6Est 5:3Est 5:6Est 5:7Est 5:8Est 7:2Est 7:3Est 9:12

What scholars say about baqqashah

בַּקָּשָׁה is a noun of the qattālāh pattern formed from the root בקשׁ "to seek," restricted to Late Biblical Hebrew and confined to Esther (5:3, 5:6, 5:7, 5:8, 7:2, 7:3, 9:12) and Ezra 7:6 (BDB; HALOT; DCH). In Esther it stands in a fixed courtly word pair with שְׁאֵלָה, in the king's doubled question and in Esther's doubled reply. Commentators on Esther generally read the doubling as a feature of the book's heightened Persian court style rather than as two sharply separated technical terms, while the lexica still describe שְׁאֵלָה as the petition presented and בַּקָּשָׁה as the object sought; the chiastic distribution of Esther 7:3, where נַפְשִׁי answers בִּשְׁאֵלָתִי and עַמִּי answers בְּבַקָּשָׁתִי, shows that the pair can be spread across two distinct objects rather than functioning as a single hendiadys. Ezra 7:6 uses the noun metonymically for what the king actually granted, the same slide from appeal to object that שְׁאֵלָה shows in Psalm 106:15.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. בַּקָּשָׁהlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. בַּקָּשָׁהlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), s.v. בַּקָּשָׁהlexicon
  • Frederic W. Bush, Ruth, Esther, Word Biblical Commentary 9 (1996)commentary
  • Adele Berlin, Esther, JPS Bible Commentary (2001)commentary
  • Michael V. Fox, Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther (1991)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of בַּקָּשָׁה

f s construct

בַּקָּשָׁתֵךְ

Est 5:3, Est 5:6, Est 7:2, Est 9:12

f s construct

בַּקָּשָׁתִי

Est 5:7, Est 5:8, Est 7:3

f s construct

בַּקָּשָׁתוֹ

Ezr 7:6