בֶּ֫רַע
Bera
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Bera’ fuller range ↓
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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H1298 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Genesis 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 name ברע centers on the idea of “Bera.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Genesis (100%). Its lone occurrence is Genesis 14:2. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1298 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.
- #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
- Genesis 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Bera 1×
- American Standard Version: Bera 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bera 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bera 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1298 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1298 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1298 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1298 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Bera = "son of evil"
- a king of Sodom
Word origin
n.pr.m. king of Sodom Gn 14:2 ( √ unknown; 𝔊 Βαλλα).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of uncertain derivation
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.
רַע I
- [shaken,] weak, sick; bad; (noun) evil. Ber. 7ᵃ מפני מה … ורע לו why is there a righteous man who fares well, and another righteous man who fares badly? Ib. 23ᵃ (ref. to Koh. IV, 17) בין טוב לרע וכ׳ they cannot distinguish between good and evil, and want to offer a sacrifice before me? Kidd. 40ᵃ (ref. to Is. III, 11) וכי יש רשע רע ויש שאינו רע is there a bad wicked man and a wicked man that is not bad?; רע לשמים ורע לבריות וכ׳ one bad in his relation to heaven (irreligious) and bad to men is a bad wicked man &c. Ohol. XVIII, 6 שכחן רע whose strength is feeble, v. כֹּחַ. Ab. II, 9 חבר רע a bad companion; לב רע a bad heart; a. v. fr.—Fem. רָעָה bad; (noun) evil. Ib., a. fr. עין ר׳, v. עַיִן. Sabb. 11ᵃ כל ד׳ ולא אשה ר׳ any evil, only not a bad wife. Ber. 61ᵃ אחת … ואחת יועצתו לר׳ one (kidney) counsels for good, the other for evil. Y. Shek. I, beg. 45ᵈ לטובה … לר׳ וכ׳ for a good purpose—‘every liberal-hearted’ (Ex. XXXV, 22), for a bad purpose—‘the whole people’ (ib. XXXII, 3). Hor. 10ᵇ אפי׳ טובתם … ר׳ היא וכ׳ even the good which wicked men do is an evil with the righteous (they do not enjoy it); Yeb. 103ᵃ sq. Koh. R. to V, 12, v. חוֹלָה I. Ber. l. c. (ref. to Koh. IV, 17) אל תהי … אם על ר׳ הם מביאים be not like the fools who sin and offer a sacrifice, not knowing whether they offer it for the good they have done or for the evil; a. v. fr.—Pl. רָעִים; רָעוֹת. Keth. 110ᵇ (quot. fr. Ben Sira) כל ימי עני ר׳ all the days of a poor man are bad; Snh. 101ᵃ. Y. Ber. V, 8ᵈ bot., v. חָצַף. Ex. R. s. 42 (ref. to Jer. II, 13) ושתי ר׳ עשו לבד have they committed no more than two evils?; a. v. fr. e.g. Ecclesiastes 4:17
רַע II
- to be evil, v. רָעַע.
רַע III
- ch. = אֲרַע, v. לרַע
רֵעַ
- , v. רֵיעַ
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.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Bera). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Gift, or son of evil, king of Sodom at the time of the invasion of the four kings under Chedorlaomer (Gen. 14:2, 8, 17, 21).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(son of evil) king of Sodom. (Genesis 14:2) also (Genesis 14:17,21)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
a well; declaring
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
