חֲרַב
to dry up
‘to dry up’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hophal
- The passive counterpart of the Hiphil (“he was caused to…”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2718 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Ezra 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.
“to dry up” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb חרב (chărab). A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Ezra, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. It occurs only once, in Ezra 4:15. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2718 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezra 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Destroyed 1×
- American Standard Version: Laid waste 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Was destroyed 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Was destroyed 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2718 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2718 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2718 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2718 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- to dry up, be waste
- (Hophal) to be laid waste
Word origin
[ חֲרַב ] vb. be waste;— Hoph. Ezr 4:15
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חרב (chârab) (H2717) — to lay waste.
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.
חָרִב I
- (b. h.) to be burned, dried up, ruined, waste. Snh. 22ᵃ כאלו ח׳ בה"מ וכ׳ as if the Temple had been destroyed in his days. Tosef. Men. XIII, 22 מפני מה חָרְבָה וכ׳ why was Shiloh destroyed?; Yoma 9ᵃ. Kil. IV, 1 (expl. קרחת הכרם) כרם שח׳ באמצעו a vineyard the central part of which is laid waste. Ib. V, 1; a. fr. [Num. R. s. 7, end בבל ח׳ מקדש, read: החריב. Taan. 29ᵃ כשח׳ טורנוס, read: כשחרש, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l.]
- to be destroyed. Erub. 18ᵇ. Yoma 39ᵇ שסופך עתיד לֵיחָרֵב that it is thy final destiny to be destroyed; a. fr.
- same. Pesik. R. s. 31 שיִתְחָרֵב. [Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXXIII, v. חָרַךְ.]
- to destroy, lay waste. Tosef. M. Kat. I, 5 מַחֲרִיבִין חורי וכ׳ you may destroy ant-stores (during the festive week). Num. R. s. 7, end שהֶחֱרִיבוּ בה"מ for they (the Romans) destroyed the Temple; a. fr.
- to be destroyed. Pes. 42ᵇ (ref. to Ez. XXVI, 2) אי מלאה זו הָחְרְבָה זו Ms. M. (ed. חרבה, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 9) when the one (Jerusalem) is populated, the other (Caesarea) is laid waste; Yalk. Gen. 110 חֲרֵיבָה. e.g. Ezekiel 26:2
חֲרֵב
- Targ. Ez. XXVI, 2. Targ. Hos. XIII, 15. Targ. Is. XIX, 5; a. fr.—Naz. 32ᵇ דח׳ בה"מ that the Temple has been destroyed. Ib. דיִחְרוֹב that it will be destroyed. Gitt. 56ᵃ דלא לִיחֲרוֹב וכ׳ that Jerusalem may not be destroyed. Y. Ber. II, 5ᵃ top דברגליה חריב with whose arrival it was destroyed; a. fr.
- to destroy, lay waste. Targ. Is. XLII, 15. Targ. Jud. XVI, 24; a. fr.—Yoma 69ᵇ דאַחְרְבֵיה וכ׳ who destroyed the Temple. Taan. 29ᵃ top לאַחְרוּבֵי Ms. M. a. Rashi (ed. לַחְרוּבֵי); Gitt. 56ᵃ לַחְרוּבֵי; a. fr.
- to be destroyed. Y. Ber. l. c.
חָרֵב II
- preced. wds.)
- 1. ruined. Y. Ber. IV, 8ᵃ. Yalk. Gen. 110, p. חָרֵב I; a. fr.—Pl. חֲרֵבִים, חֲרֵי׳; f. חֲרֵבוֹת, חֲרֵי׳. Ex. R. s. 31 (ref. to Num. XXIV, 5) ומַשְׁכנותיך כשהם ח׳ thy pledges, when they are in ruins, v. מַשְׁכּוֹן; a. fr. e.g. Numbers 24:5
- 2. dry. Y. Sot. III, beg. 18ᶜ ח׳ של חטין the dry (oil-less) offering of wheat, opp. בלול. Kidd. 62ᵃ top; a. e.
חָרֵב
- ch., v. חָרוֹב
חֶרֶב
- 1. sword. Ḥull. 3ᵃ, v. חָלָל I. B. Bath. 8ᵇ ח׳ קשה וכ׳ death in war is a greater affliction than natural death. Snh. 116ᵃ מהם הרגו בח׳ some of them they put to death by the sword. Tanḥ. Balak 8; Num. R. s. 20 אא"כ שלף חַרְבּוֹ without drawing his sword. Ib. בח׳ חייהם live on their sword. Taan. III, 5 על הח׳ on the sword, i.e. when armies are passing the country. Ib. 22ᵃ ח׳ של שלום a friendly army passing; a. fr.
- 2. the sword-shaped handle of a plough. Kel. XXI, 2. Tosef. Kel. B. Bath. I, 7.—Pl. חֲרָבוֹת. Pesik. R. s. 21 ח׳ מכאן וכ׳ (soldiers with) swords here &c.; a. e.
חָרֶב
- same. Targ. Gen. XXXIV, 26. Ib. III, 24; a. fr.—Sabb. 123ᵇ, v. אוּשְׁכָּפָא; (Ar. scraping knife).
חָרֶב ²
- (חרב) dry eruption. Targ. Y. Deut. XXVIII, 27 Ar. ed. Koh. חרב (oth. ed. חרבא, חרבונא; Targ. ed. גרבא; h. text גרב).
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2718, 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 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
