חִירָה
Hirah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Hirah’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H2437 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.
Genesis 2 verses
- Genesis 38:1 חִירָֽה n Proper It happened at that time, that Judah went down from his brothers, and visited a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.
- Genesis 38:12 וְ/חִירָ֛ה conj + n Proper After many days, Shua's daughter, the wife of Judah, died. Judah was comforted, and went up to his sheep-shearers to Timnah, he and his friend Hirah, the Adullamite.
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.
חירה (Chîyrâh) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Hirah.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. It clusters heavily in Genesis, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. It first appears in Genesis 38:1. For the data behind this summary, explore 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2437 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
- Genesis 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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Hirah 1×, Was hirah 1×
- American Standard Version: Hirah 1×, Was hirah 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hirah 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Hirah 1×, Was hirah 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2437 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2437 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2437 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2437 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Hirah = "a noble family"
- an Adullamite, the friend of Judah
Word origin
Derived from חור (châvar) (H2357) — to be white.
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.
חִירָה
- (חוּר) cavernous rocks resembling human figures. Mekh. B’shall. s. 1 (ref. to Pi-Haḥiroth, Ex. XIV,
- 2. מה ח׳ וכ׳ what was the nature of these rocks?—They were not slanting but abrupt &c. Ib. הח׳ מצד וכ׳ the rocks were on one side, and Migdol &c. Ib. איו ח׳ אלא מקום חֵירוּתָן וכ׳ ḥiroth means the place of Israel’s liberty (licentiousness); Yalk. Ex. 230; Num. R. s. 20.
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 H2437 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/חִירָ֛ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 38:12 | 1 |
| חִירָֽה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 38:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2437, 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
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 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Hirah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(a noble race), an Adullamite, the friend of Judah. (Genesis 38:1,12) and see Genesis38:20
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
liberty; anger
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
