גׇּפְרִית
brimstone
‘brimstone’ is one of 3 main senses 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
- 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1614 appears in the Book of Genesis — 1 distinct verse. 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
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.
גפרית (gophrîyth) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “brimstone.” Its English rendering has broadened — “brimstone” classically, “sulfur” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 2 of 7 verses. Ranging over 3 senses, it is not a single-sense word. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1614 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 2 verses 29%
- Genesis 1 verse 14%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 14%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 29%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 29%
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: Brimstone 5×
- American Standard Version: Brimstone 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sulfur 5×, Burning sulfur 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Brimstone 3×, Sulfur 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1614 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1614 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1614 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1614 across 7 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.
Senses in BDB
The 3 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.
- brimstone
- of judgment (figuratively)
- of Jehovah's breath (figuratively)
Word origin
n.f. brimstone (Aramaic גּוּפְרִיתָא, also כבריתא, כובריתא, ܟܶܒܪܝܺܬܳܐ, ܟܽܒܪܝܺܬܳܐ; Arabic كِبْرِيت (certainly foreign wd.); der. from (כֹּפֶר), גֹּפֶר by Thes RobGes, cf. Di Gn 6:14; i.e. pitch, and then other combustibles, especially sulphur; Lagl.c. thinks from Bactr. vohûkereti)—גָּפְרִית Gn 19:24 + 6 times—brimstone, after הִמְטִיר Gn 19:24 (J), fig. of judgment ψ 11:6 Ez 38:22 (in all ‖ אֵשׁ etc.), cf. also Jb 18:15 Is 34:9, & Dt 29:22; נַחַל ג׳ simile for the destroying breath of י׳ Is 30:33.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from גפר (gôpher) (H1613) — gopher wood.
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.
גָּפְרִית
- sulphur [or bitumen, pitch]. Sabb. 18ᵃ, a. e., v. גָּפַר Hithpa.
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 6 distinct written forms H1614 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| גָּפְרִ֣ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 29:23 | 2 |
| גָפְרִֽית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 18:15 | 1 |
| גָּפְרִ֔ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 30:33 | 1 |
| וְ/גָפְרִ֗ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 38:22 | 1 |
| וְ֭/גָפְרִית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 11:6 | 1 |
| לְ/גָפְרִ֑ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 34:9 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
