דְּמָה
to resemble
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1821 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 3:25 דָּמֵ֖ה Qal ptcp.act ms He answered, Look, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.
- Daniel 7:5 דָּמְיָ֣ה Qal ptcp.act fs Behold, another animal, a second, like a bear; and it was raised up on one side, and three ribs were in its mouth between its teeth: and they said thus to it, Arise, devour much flesh.
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.
דמה (dᵉmâh) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to resemble.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Daniel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Debuting at Daniel 3:25, it then recurs through the corpus. From the same root come דמה, דמות and דמיון. 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 H1821 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Is like 1×, Like 1×
- American Standard Version: Is like 1×, Like 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Like 1×, Looked like 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Is like 1×, Like 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1821 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1821 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1821 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1821 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.
- (Peal) to be like
Word origin
[ דְּמָה ] vb. be like;— Pe. Dn 3:25
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דמה (dâmâh) (H1819) — to resemble.
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.
דָּמָה
- pr. n. m., v. דָּמָא
דָּמָה ²
- , v. דמי
דמי
- v. דמם,
- 1. to mumble, think (cmp. דבב); to be silent. Denom. (דִּימָה,) דָּמוּת.
- 2. to imagine, compare. Denom. דְּמוּת.
- 3. (denom. of דְּמוּת) to resemble, be like, to imitate. Sabb. 133ᵇ הוי דוֹמֶה לו imitate Him. Ber. 29ᵇ שתפלתו דוֹמָה עליו וכ׳ to whom his prayer appears like a burden. Taan. 22ᵇ אין דורו דומה יפה (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 20) his generation was not considered worthy. B. Kam. 92ᵇ; Yalk. Jud. 67 ובן אדם לדו׳ לו (not ובני) and man associates with his equal. Sifra Sh’mini Par. 10, ch. XII; Ḥull. 76ᵇ הַדֹּומֶה that which resembles the animal specified in the Bible (species); הד׳ לַדֹּומֶה what resembles the animal classified with the animal specified in the Bible (genus); a. fr.—אֵינוֹ דוֹמֶה there is no resemblance, you cannot compare. Yeb. 64ᵃ א׳ ד׳ תפלת … לתפלת וכ׳ you cannot compare the prayer of … to the prayer of &c. Sabb. 119ᵇ; a. fr.—Ḥull. 48ᵇ זו דוֹמָה לזו these are analogous cases, v. Pi.—(משל) למה הדבר דומה (abbrev. מלה"ד, לה"ד) (a simile:) to what can this be compared?, a phrase introducing a simile. Taan. 25ᵇ. Yoma 86ᵇ; a. v. fr.
- [
- 1. (b. h.) to be silenced, undone].].
- 2. to be compared, to be imagined; to appear in the disguise of; to seem. Kidd. 32ᵇ כמה"ש נִדְמוּ לו that they appeared to him as ministering angels; נדמו לו לערביים they appeared to him as if they were Arabs. Succ. 52ᵃ צדיקים נ׳ להם כהר וכ׳ to the righteous sin will appear like a high mount; a. fr.—נִדְמֶה an animal suspected to be a hybrid or looking like one (cmp. דְּמַאי), esp. a lamb looking like a kid, and vice versa. Bekh. 12ᵃ ‘a ewe which gave birth to what looked like a kid’. Ḥull. 38ᵇ; a. fr.
- 1. to compare, judge from analogy. Lev. R. s. 32 דִּמִּיתִיךָ להם I made thee like them (beasts). B. Bath. 130ᵇ ובלבד שלא יְדַמֶּה וכ׳ but one must not decide ritual cases by analogy; v. Ḥull. 48ᵇ
- 2. to have an opinion without authority to refer to. Gitt. 19ᵃ; 37ᵃ מפני שאנו מְדַמִּין because we have such an opinion.—Part. pass. מְדוּמֶּה, pl. מְדוּמִּין; כמ׳ אני it seems to me, כמ׳ אנו it seems to us &c. Men. 18ᵃ. Taan. 23ᵃ; a. fr.—Y. Ber. II, 5ᵇ bot. כמ׳ הייתי I thought.
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 2 distinct written forms H1821 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| דָּמְיָ֣ה | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 7:5 | 1 |
| דָּמֵ֖ה | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 3:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1821, 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.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
