חֲסַף
clay
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Particle, Definite Article 4 times (44%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (33%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (22%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 9 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2635 appears — 7 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.
Daniel 7 verses
- Daniel 2:33 חֲסַֽף n c ms its legs of iron, its feet part of iron, and part of clay.
- Daniel 2:34 וְ/חַסְפָּ֑/א conj + n c ms det + ptcl def.art You saw until a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet that were of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces.
- Daniel 2:35 חַסְפָּ֨/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art Then was the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken in pieces together, and became like the chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was found for them: and the stone that struck the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.
- Daniel 2:41 חֲסַ֤ף בַּ/חֲסַ֥ף n c ms prep + n c ms cs Whereas you saw the feet and toes, part of potters' clay, and part of iron, it shall be a divided kingdom; but there shall be in it of the strength of the iron, because you saw the iron mixed with miry clay.
- Daniel 2:42 חֲסַ֑ף n c ms As the toes of the feet were part of iron, and part of clay, so the kingdom shall be partly strong, and partly broken.
- Daniel 2:43 בַּ/חֲסַ֣ף חַסְפָּֽ/א prep + n c ms cs n c ms det + ptcl def.art Whereas you saw the iron mixed with miry clay, they shall mingle themselves with the seed of men; but they shall not cling to one another, even as iron does not mingle with clay.
- Daniel 2:45 חַסְפָּ/א֙ n c ms det + ptcl def.art Because you saw that a stone was cut out of the mountain without hands, and that it broke in pieces the iron, the brass, the clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God has made known to the king what shall happen hereafter: and the dream is certain, and the interpretation of it sure.
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.
“clay” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חסף (chăçaph). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. It appears 7 verses across 1 book of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Scripture first uses it in Daniel 2:33. See the sense tree, 7-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2635 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 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: Clay 9×
- American Standard Version: Clay 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Clay 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Clay 7×, Soft 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2635 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2635 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2635 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2635 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.
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.
- clay, potsherd
Word origin
חֲסַף n.[m.] clay, potsherd
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חספס (chaçpaç) (H2636) — to scale off.
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.
חֲסַף I
- (cmp. חָסַל) to peel off; (neut. verb) to be scaly, rough.
- to pound grain &c. Y. Sabb. VII, 10ᵇ bot. ח׳ פלפלין pounds pepper (cmp. מחספס, Ex. XVI, 14). [Y. B. Mets. II, 8ᶜ bot. וחספתה, v. חֲפַס.] e.g. Exodus 16:14
- [to become white, cmp. כסף,] to feel ashamed. Targ. II Esth. VI, 12.
חֲסַף II
- (preced.) (= h. חֶרֶשׂ)
- 1. rough clay, מאנא דח׳ clay vessel (common and easily broken). (common and easily broken). Targ. O. Lev. XI, 33; a. e.
- 2. [something with which to peel or scrape,] fragment of a vessel, potsherd. Targ. Prov. XXVI, 23.—Yeb. 92ᵇ, a. e., v. דְּלֵי. Kidd. 18ᵃ (prov.) נקיט … יהיבנא ליה ח׳ he had a pearl in his hand, and we give him a sherd, i.e. for a valuable object we give him a valueless paper; a. fr.—Pl. חַסְפִּין, חִ׳. Gen. R. s. 14, v. דְּבַק; Midr. Till. to Ps. II; a. e.
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 9 distinct written forms H2635 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּ/חֲסַ֣ף | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 2:43 | 1 |
| בַּ/חֲסַ֥ף | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 2:41 | 1 |
| וְ/חַסְפָּ֑/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 2:34 | 1 |
| חֲסַ֑ף | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 2:42 | 1 |
| חֲסַ֤ף | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 2:41 | 1 |
| חֲסַֽף | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 2:33 | 1 |
| חַסְפָּ/א֙ | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 2:45 | 1 |
| חַסְפָּ֨/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 2:35 | 1 |
| חַסְפָּֽ/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 2:43 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
