חֶמְאָה
butter
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
- 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.
Every verse where H2529 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 7:15 חֶמְאָ֥ה n c fs He shall eat butter and honey when he knows to refuse the evil, and choose the good.
- Isaiah 7:22 חֶמְאָ֑ה חֶמְאָ֤ה n c fs n c fs and it shall happen, that because of the abundance of milk which they shall give he shall eat butter: for everyone will eat butter and honey that is left in the midst of the land.
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.
The Hebrew noun חמאה centers on the idea of “butter.” Where the King James Version says “butter,” newer translations reach for “curds” (Berean Standard Bible); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 9 verses — uncommon. First canonically at Genesis 18:8, it enters the text early. Related forms include חומה, חם and חמת. 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 H2529 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,342
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,342 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 44%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 33%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 22%
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: Butter 10×
- American Standard Version: Butter 10×
- Berean Standard Bible: Curds 7×, Cream 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Curds 5×, Butter 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2529 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2529 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2529 across 10 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 H2529 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- curd, butter
Word origin
n.f. curd;—ח׳ Gn 18:8 + 6 times; = חֵמָה Jb 29:6; cstr. חֶמְאַח Dt 32:14; curd, curdled milk, mod. leben on mode of making lebben, by shaking milk in sour milk-skin, v. DoughtyArabic Des. i. 221, 263; ii. 304, etc. Thomson Land and Book ii. 418. See also ARSKEncy. Bib. Milk. מִיץ חָלָב יוֹצִיא ח׳ Pr 30:33, elsewhere joined with חָלָב Gn 18:8 (J) Dt 32:14 (poem; חֶמְאַת בָּקָר וַחֲלֵב צֹאן), Ju 5:25 (where served בְּסֵפֶל אַדִּירִים, v. ספל); with דְּבַשׁ 2 S 17:29 Is 7:15, 22(×2); cf. נַחֲלֵי דבשׁ וח׳ fig. of abundance Jb 20:17; בִּרְחֹץ הֲלִיכַי בְּחֵמָ֑ה Jb 29:6 (‖ צוּר יָצוּק פַּלְגֵי־שָֽׁמֶן׃). מַחֲמָאֹת.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חומה (chôwmâh) (H2346) — wall.
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.
חֶמְאָה
- v. חמי) [pressed, thick,] cream or butter. Ber. 63ᵇ (ref. to Prov. XXX, 33) ח׳ של תורה the cream of the Law (sound knowledge). B. Mets. 86ᵇ בשכר ח׳ וכ׳ as a reward for the offer of cream and milk (Gen. XVIII, 8). e.g. Proverbs 30:33
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 10 distinct written forms H2529 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/חֵמָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 29:6 | 1 |
| וְ/חֶמְאָ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 17:29 | 1 |
| וְ/חֶמְאָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 20:17 | 1 |
| חֶמְאַ֨ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 32:14 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 7:22 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 30:33 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָ֜ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 18:8 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָ֤ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 7:22 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 7:15 | 1 |
| חֶמְאָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 5:25 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2529, 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
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. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
