The derivation
BDB gives bāśār a short, plain entry — "flesh" — and then unfolds the word across five senses that move from the anatomical to the theological: first the flesh of the body itself; then, by extension, the body as a whole standing for the flesh that composes it; a euphemistic sense (the male organ of generation); "flesh" for kindred and blood relations; and, the fifth and final sense BDB records, "man over against God as frail or erring" (BDB s.v. בָּשָׂר, Strong's H1320). That last sense is the theological payload the word carries into its most consequential New Testament use: Greek σάρξ (see sarx), the word Paul turns into a name for the human condition measured against God, translates bāśār directly in the Septuagint — the crown essay for σάρξ names this exact Hebrew source when it observes that "in the LXX σάρξ renders the Hebrew basar."
Bāśār's founding appearance in Genesis states the word's most enduring use as kinship-language: after God brings the woman to the man, the text declares that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, "וְהָי֖וּ לְבָשָׂ֥ר אֶחָֽד" — and the two become one flesh (Gen. 2:24). The same chapter uses bāśār for the literal substance closed up where the rib was taken (Gen. 2:21, 2:23) before the word turns, in the very next verse, to name the union of marriage itself — flesh moving in three sentences from anatomy, to the body as such, to kinship bond.
Root
- BDB records no separate consonantal root distinct from the noun's own attested sense range (flesh of the body → the body itself → euphemism → kindred → frail humanity before God) — treated as one continuous semantic field (BDB s.v. בָּשָׂר, H1320).
- No HALOT cross-check is available: the single HALOT volume in the audited library covers only the letters zayin through ṭet, not ב — an honest gap, not an omission. BDB is the verified authority for this lemma.
In the corpus
270 occurrences, all within the single indexed work Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), 8.8 per 10,000 words — the rarest of the five Hebrew words gathered here. The corpus tooling does not yet break the Tanakh into constituent books for frequency profiling, so no book-level distribution table is available — an honest limitation of the current indexing. Individual attestations recovered by concordance include the two founding Genesis passages (2:21–24, the rib and "one flesh"), 1 Samuel 17:44 (Goliath's threat to give David's bāśār to the birds), and 1 Samuel 2:13/2:15 (the sons of Eli mishandling sacrificial flesh) — a spread across the primeval history, the historical narratives, and the priestly material that matches the sense-range BDB records.
The word's world
Bāśār moves from the plainest physical fact — the meat and tissue of a body — to the deepest statement of kinship the Hebrew Bible makes: "one flesh" as the term for marriage itself, a phrase whose force depends entirely on bāśār still carrying its literal, bodily sense even as it names a relationship rather than a substance. The word's fifth BDB sense — flesh as the mark of human frailty set against God — is the hinge on which the whole Pauline development of Greek σάρξ turns: the sarx crown essay traces exactly this development, from anatomical tissue in classical Greek to the LXX's rendering of bāśār, to Paul's use of the same Greek word for the self-enclosed, mortal condition of humanity. Hebrew's own word never leaves the body to become an abstraction the way its Greek and Pauline afterlife does — even at its most theological, in "all flesh" as a phrase for humanity entire, bāśār still means the actual, breathing tissue every living thing is made of.
Authorities: Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906) s.v. בָּשָׂר (Strong's H1320) — from the audited BDB (1906) layer, public domain. HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner) cross-check unavailable: the single volume in the audited library covers letters zayin–ṭet only, not ב — an honest gap, not an omission. Corpus figures and citations via the live Logoi instruments: lemma_lookup, frequency_profile, concordance_search — receipt soul-word-journey-v0. Cross-reference: sarx.