בֹּ֫סֶר
sour grapes
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1155 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 31:29 בֹ֑סֶר n c ms In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
- Jeremiah 31:30 הַ/בֹּ֖סֶר ptcl def.art + n c ms But everyone shall die for his own iniquity: every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.
Ezekiel 1 verse
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.
The Hebrew noun בסר centers on the idea of “sour grapes.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. Jeremiah dominates its distribution — 2 of 4 verses. Its earliest occurrence is Isaiah 18:5. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1155 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
By section of the Old Testament
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 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: Sour grape 3×
- American Standard Version: Sour grapes 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sour grapes 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Grape 1×, Sour grapes 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1155 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1155 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1155 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1155 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- unripe grapes, sour grapes
Word origin
בֹ֫סֶר n.m. unripe or sour grapes coll.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בסר (beçer) (H1154) — sour grapes.
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.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms H1155 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| בֹ֑סֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 31:29 | 1 |
| בֹ֔סֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 18:2 | 1 |
| הַ/בֹּ֖סֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 31:30 | 1 |
| וּ/בֹ֥סֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 18:5 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 Hebrew verses 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.
