זֶ֫רֶת
span
‘span’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where H2239 appears in the Absolute state, across 3 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.
Exodus 2 verses
- Exodus 28:16 זֶ֥רֶת וְ/זֶ֥רֶת n c fs conj + n c fs It shall be square and folded double; a span shall be its length of it, and a span its breadth.
- Exodus 39:9 זֶ֧רֶת וְ/זֶ֥רֶת n c fs conj + n c fs It was square. They made the breastplate double. Its length was a span, and its breadth a span, being double.
1 Samuel 1 verse
Isaiah 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, זרת (zereth) means “span.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Exodus (40%), then 1 Samuel and Isaiah. It first appears in Exodus 28:16. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2239 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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 5 occurrences in the concordance →
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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 60%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 40%
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: Span 5×, Thereof and a span 2×
- American Standard Version: Span 5×, Thereof 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Span 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Span 6×, And 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2239 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2239 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2239 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2239 across 9 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 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.
- span
- a unit of measure, approx half-cubit, or the distance from the thumb to the little finger on an outstretched hand
Word origin
n.f. span (NH id. (𝔗 זַרְתָּא, Syriac ܙܰܪܬܳܐ; appar. from Heb.), etym. dub.; Thes and most der. from √ זרה, vid. Ol§ 146 b but also Sta§ 187 a; Ba ZMG 1887, 607 proposes √ זרה measure off, determine, cf. p. 280)—span, as standard of measurement, שָׁמַיִם בַּז׳ תִּכֵּן Is 40:12; elsewhere of actual size, a span, distance between ends of thumb and little finger of spread hand; = ½ cubit (v. אַמָּה & reff.; cf. Ex 25:10 with JosephAnt. iii. 6, 5), ז׳ Ex 28:16(×2); 39:9(×2) (all P) Ez 43:13; זָ֑רֶת 1 S 17:4 six cubits and a span. Vid. Hultsch Metrol. 1882, 443 BenzArchäol 179.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from זרה (zârâh) (H2219) — to scatter.
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.
זֶרֶת
- preced.) span (the spread fingers); distance from the little finger to the thumb of a spread hand. Keth. 5ᵇ; Men. 11ᵃ זו ז׳ this one (the little finger) is used for measuring the span. Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. VI, 12 ז׳ אמורה וכ׳ zereth mentioned therein (in measures), is half a cubit of six handbreadths; a. fr.—Du. זֵרָתַיִים, זֵירָ׳. Men. 85ᵃ; Tosef. ib. IX, 3 קנה זרת ושבולת ז׳ the halm one span long, and the ear two; Taan. 5ᵃ יֵרָתַיִם.
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 H2239 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/זֶ֥רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 28:16 | 2 |
| בַּ/זֶּ֣רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 40:12 | 1 |
| וָ/זָֽרֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 17:4 | 1 |
| זֶ֣רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 43:13 | 1 |
| זֶ֥רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 28:16 | 1 |
| זֶ֧רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 39:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2239, 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 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
