חָתָה
to seize
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
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2846 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 2 verses
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.
“to seize” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb חתה (châthâh). With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than half of its appearances fall in Proverbs. Scripture first uses it in Psalms 52:5. It shares a root with מחתה. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2846 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 25%
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: Take 2×
- American Standard Version: He will take thee up 1×, Take 1×, Thou wilt heap 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Embrace 1×, He will snatch you up 1×, Large enough to scoop 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are heaping 1×, Carry 1×, Could 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2846 across 4 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2846 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2846 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2846 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 1 sense the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Impf. יַחְתֶּה Pr 6:27; sf. יַחְתְּךָ ψ 52:7; Inf. cstr. לַחְתּוֹת Is 30:14; Pt. חֹתֶה Pr 25:22;—snatch up, c. acc. אֵשׁ מִיָּקוּד Is 30:14 to snatch up fire from a hearth (‖ לַחְשֹׂף מים מִגֶּבֶא); אֵשׁ בְּחֵיקוֹ Pr 6:27 shall a man snatch up fire in his bosom and his garments not be burned? (in sim. of adulterer); pregn. seize (and put) upon גֶּחָלִים אַתָּה ח׳ על־רֹאשׁוֹ Pr 25:22; יַחְתְּךָ וְיִסָּֽחֲךָ מֵאֹ֑הֶל ψ 52:7 God … shall snatch thee away, and pluck thee up tent-less. e.g. Proverbs 6:27
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. snatch up, usually fire, coals (NH id.; 𝔗 חֲתָא id. (rare); Assyrian ḫatû is destroy (i.e. snatch away?) v. SASmithAsrb. i. 90)—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
חָתָא
- , v. חתי
חתי ²
- (b. h.) to dig, esp. to take coals out with a pan. Yoma IV, 4 בכל יום היה חוֹתֶה וכ׳ every other day the priest used to take coals out in a silver pan &c. Sabb. VIII, 7 כדי לַחְתּוֹת בו את האור large enough to take fire out in it. Zeb. 64ᵃ; a. fr.—Y. Yoma IV, 41ᶜ bot. צריך לחות (read לחתות) he must take coals out as before.
- to stir embers, rake. Sabb. 34ᵇ שמא יְחַתֶּה בגחלים he might rake the coals under the ashes. [Ḥull. 27ᵃ, v. חָתַת].
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 4 distinct written forms H2846 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הֲ/יַחְתֶּ֤ה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 6:27 | 1 |
| חֹתֶ֣ה | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 25:22 | 1 |
| יַחְתְּ/ךָ֣ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 52:5 | 1 |
| לַ/חְתּ֥וֹת | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Isaiah 30:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2846, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
