זַעֲוָה
terror
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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 H2189 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Jeremiah 3 verses
- Jeremiah 15:4 לְ/זַֽעֲוָ֔ה prep + n c fs I will cause them to be tossed back and forth among all the kingdoms of the earth, because of Manasseh, the son of Hezekiah, king of Judah, for that which he did in Jerusalem.
- Jeremiah 29:18 לְ/זַעֲוָ֜ה prep + n c fs I will pursue after them with the sword, with the famine, and with the pestilence, and will deliver them to be tossed back and forth among all the kingdoms of the earth, to be an object of horror, and an astonishment, and a hissing, and a reproach, among all the nations where I have driven them;
- Jeremiah 34:17 לְ/זַעֲוָ֔ה prep + n c fs Therefore thus says Yahweh: you have not listened to me, to proclaim liberty, every man to his brother, and every man to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim to you a liberty, says Yahweh, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine; and I will make you to be tossed back and forth among all the kingdoms of the earth.
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.
At its core, זעוה (zaʻăvâh) means “terror.” Its uses cluster heavily in Jeremiah (50% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Deuteronomy 28:25. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2189 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 3 verses 50%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 17%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 17%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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: Be removed 4×
- American Standard Version: Be tossed 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Object of horror 1×, Terror 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Be terrorized 1×, Horror 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2189 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2189 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H2189 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2189 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.
- a horror, trembling, object of terror or trembling
Word origin
and, by transpos., זַעֲוָה (Di Dt 28:25 cf. Sta§ 192 a) n.f. a trembling, i.e. object of trembling, terror: זְוָעָה Is 28:19, also Kt Je 15:4 + 4 times; זַעֲוָה Dt 28:25 Ez 23:46 (also Qr Je 15:4 + 4 times);—object of trembling, terror, fright; וְהָיִיתָ לְזַעֲוָה Dt 28:25 and thou shalt become a terror to all (לְכֹל) the kingdoms of the earth; וּנְתַתִּים לְז׳ וגו׳ Je 15:4; 29:18; 34:17 (‖ לְאָלָה וּלְשַׁמָּה וְלִשְׁרֵקָה וּלְחֶרְפָּה), also וּנְתַתִּים לְז׳ וגו׳ 24:9 (‖ לְחֶרְפָּה וּלְמָשָׁל לִשְׁנִינָה וְלִקְלָלָה), Ez 23:46 2 Ch 29:8.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from זועה (zᵉvâʻâh) (H2113) — terror.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H2189 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לְ/זַעֲוָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 28:25 | 2 |
| לְ/זַֽעֲוָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 15:4 | 1 |
| לְ/זַֽעֲוָה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 29:8 | 1 |
| לְ/זַעֲוָ֜ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 29:18 | 1 |
| לְ/זַעֲוָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 23:46 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
