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בֶּסֶר

sour grapes

H1154 Strong's Hebrew
beçer Transliteration
/beh'-ser/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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About this entry

At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.

At its core, בסר (beçer) means “sour grapes.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. The word gravitates to Job (100%). Its lone occurrence is Job 15:33. It clusters with בסר under a shared root. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
unripe grape
Modern gloss
sour grapes
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H1154 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.

These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 15:33
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Job 15:33.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

  • Job 1 verse 100%

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 1 · 100%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

By traditional corpus

Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 1 distinct verse.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 100%

How translations render this word

Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).

  • King James Version: Unripe grape 1×
  • American Standard Version: Unripe grape 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Unripe grapes 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Unripe grapes 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H1154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Unripe grape” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H1154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Unripe grape” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H1154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Unripe grapes” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H1154 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Unripe grapes” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 1 sense BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.

  1. unripe or sour grapes

Word origin

Origin: from an unused root meaning to be sour

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 257


Jastrow Dictionary

A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.

בָּסַר I

  • (√בס, v. בסס) to tread upon; trnsf. (v. בעט) to contemn (with על); to be overbearing (with ב). Ex. R. s. 42, end כך היתה בוֹסֶרֶת עלי so did she slight me. Ex. R. s. 3 beg.; s. 45 בּוֹסֵר הוא על וכ׳ he will treat his prophetic mission lightly. Tanḥ. Ekeb 1 בָּסַרְתִּי בהן have I become overbearing because I observed thy commands? (Tanḥ. ed. Bub. 2 כפרתי, v. note a. l.). Ib. Mikkets 10 לא תהא בוסר בשעת וכ׳ be not haughty in happiness, so as to refuse to pray. Ib. (ed. Bub.) Emor 29 בוסר עליהן; Tanḥ. ib. 20 (some ed. בוחר, corr. acc.) thinks lightly of them.—Part. pass. בָּסוּר, fem. בְּסוּרָה contemptible. Tanḥ. Sh’moth 11.
    • same. Ex. R. s. 1 וב׳ עליה (some ed. וכופר) and he despised it (idolatry). Tanḥ. Ekeb 1 some ed. ביסרתי, v. supra.

בְּסַר

  • Targ. Ps. LXIX, 34; a. fr.
    • same. Targ. O. Num. XV, 31 ed. Berl.; a. fr.; [in ed. sometimes בשר].—Targ. I Sam. XI, 12 מבסר למימר spoke sneeringly.—Y. Ber. II, 5ᶜ bot. בר נש דאימיה מְבַסְּרָא ליה one whom his mother (Palestine) despises and his stepmother (Babylon) honors; v. אֵם. Y. Snh. I, 19ᵃ top; Y. Ned. VI, 40ᵃ בעא מבסרתהון (מבסרתון; read מבסר בהון) he wanted to despise them (reject their authority).

בָּסַר II

  • (√בס, v. בסם) to begin to boil, to be in the first stage of ripening; v. next w.—Denom. בּוֹסֶר, בְּסוֹרָה.—Trnsf. (v. בָּשַׂר) to be glad. Gen. R. s. 34 end (play on לב בשר, Ezek. XXXVI, 26), [read as] Yalk. Gen. 61 לב בוסר בחלקו של חבירו a heart rejoicing in the good fortune of his neighbor.—V. בָּשַׂר. e.g. Ezekiel 36:26

בְּסַר ²

  • 1. Part. בְּסִיר m., בְּסִירָא f., pl. בְּסִירָן in the early stage of ripening. Targ. Y. Ex. IX, 34 סערייא … בסירן Ar. (ed. סרתא … כסידא, כסירא, read בסירא; h. text אביב).
  • 2. to be cheerful; v. בְּשַׂר.

בְּסַר III

  • flesh, v. בְּשַׂר, בִּשְׂרָא.

בְּשַׂר

  • 1. to be glad;—
  • *2. = Pa. Targ. Y. Gen. XXI, 7. Targ. Y. II ib. XLIX, 21 למִיבְשַׂר.
    • as preced. Pi. Targ. Y. I Gen. XLIX, 21. Targ. Jer. XX, 15; a. fr. [Targ. Y. II, Deut. IV, 34, v. בַּשְׁקַר.]
    • as preced. Nithpa. Targ. Ruth I, 6; a. e.

בְּשַׂר ²

  • , v. בִּשְׂרָא

בִּשְׂרָא

  • 1. body, flesh, meat. Targ. Gen. II, 21. Targ. Lev. XIII, 2; a. v. fr.—Ḥull. 109ᵇ בעינא … בי׳ וכ׳ I desire to eat something tasting like meat with milk. Sabb. 140ᵇ; a. v. fr.
  • 2. mortal. Targ. Y. Gen. XL, 23. Targ. Jer. XVII, 5; a. e.

A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1154, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.

Read these verses in the Septuagint

This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.

Reading settings

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