זוּעַ
to tremble
also: quiver, quake, be in terror fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
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”). Here: ‘tremble’
- Pilpel
- A reduplicated intensive stem of two-letter or hollow roots.
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
2 distinct verses where H2111 appears in the Qal stem, across 2 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Esther 1 verse
Ecclesiastes 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.
זוע — transliterated zûwaʻ — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to tremble.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses concentrate in Esther (33% of all occurrences). Debuting at Esther 5:9, it then recurs through the corpus. Alongside “to tremble” the lexicon also lists “quiver”, “quake”, and “be in terror” — part of its full sense range. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2111 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Esther 1 verse 33%
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 33%
- Habakkuk 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 67%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
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: Moved 1×, Shall tremble 1×, Shall vex 1×
- American Standard Version: Awake that shall vex 1×, Moved 1×, Shall tremble 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Disturb you 1×, Or tremble in fear 1×, Tremble 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ones shaking you 1×, Trembled 1×, When 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2111 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2111 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2111 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2111 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses one or more reduplicated stems (the Pōlēl/Pilpēl type), which for hollow or geminate roots behave much like Piel — often intensive or iterative.
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- tremble, quake
Pilp
- . causat. and intens. they that shall violently shake thee
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
זוּעַ vb. tremble, quake
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
זוּעַ
- (b. h.)
- 1. to drip, v. Hif.
- to move, shake, tremble. Pesik. R. s. 26 איברי זָעוּ עלי (read with Yalk. Jer. 262: קרבי) my bowels within me trembled.
- 1. to perspire, drip. Zeb. 18ᵇ (ref. to ביזע, Ez. XLIV, 18) במקום שמַזִּיעִין on that part of the body where one perspires. Toh. IX, 1; Meïl. 21ᵃ משיַזִּיעוּ Ar. (ed. משיָּזוּעוּ) from the time the olives begin to drip, v. מַעֲטָן. Sifra B’ḥuck., Par. 2, ch. V השמים מַזִּיעִים the heavens perspire (vapors, rain); הנחושת מזיע (read: מַזִּיעָה) bronze sweats. Gen. R. s. 20 (ref. to Gen. III, 19) הִזִּיעוּ פניו his face began to drip (tears, v. Pes. 118ᵃ); a. e. e.g. Ezekiel 44:18
- 2. to move. Tosef. Shebi. III, 4 מחרישה מְזִיעֲתָן, v. זִעֲזֵע. Koh. R. to I, 13, v. זוּז I.
- 3. to be agitated. Cant. R. to IV, 4 אפשר שלא ה׳ וכ׳ is it possible that the sensual desire was not at all agitated?
זוּעַ ²
- to move, tremble; hesitate. Targ. O. a. Y. II Ex. XX, 15. Targ. O. ib. XIII, 17 (h. text ינחם); a. fr.—Ab. V, 22 מינה לא תָזוּעַ thou shalt not move (deviate) from it (the Law).—Part. זָיַיע. Targ. Jer. IV, 24; a. e.—Lev. R. s. 10 מן … לית את ז׳ thou shalt never leave my palace. e.g. Exodus 20:15
- 1. to shake, frighten. Targ. Y. Num. VI, 24 מְזַיְּיעֵי frightening demons.
- 2. to sweat, drip. Targ. Y. Lev. XXVI, 19 (cmp. Sifra a. l., quot. in preced. w.); Targ. Y. Deut. XXVIII, 23 מְזִיעַ (Af.).
- 1. to shake, frighten. Targ. Jud. VIII, 12; a. fr.—Part. pass. מְזָעָא, f. מְזָעֲתָא. Targ. Prov. XXV, 19 Ms. (ed. מועדא).
- 2. to sweat; v. supra.
- to be frightened. Part. מִתְזְיַע. Targ. Prov. XVII, 12.
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 3 distinct written forms H2111 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| זָ֣ע | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Esther 5:9 | 1 |
| מְזַעְזְעֶ֑י/ךָ | Verb, Pilpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Habakkuk 2:7 | 1 |
| שֶׁ/יָּזֻ֨עוּ֙ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Ecclesiastes 12:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2111, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
