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יַם

sea

H3221 Strong's Hebrew
yâm Transliteration
/yawm/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

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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.

ים (yâm) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “sea.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Daniel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. It first appears in Daniel 7:2. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
sea
Modern gloss
sea
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H3221 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.
Daniel 7:2
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Daniel 7:2.
Daniel 7:3
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Daniel 7:3.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 2 · 100%

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.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Sea 2×
  • American Standard Version: Sea 2×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Sea 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sea 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H3221 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Sea” 2×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H3221 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Sea” 2×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H3221 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Sea” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H3221 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Sea” 2×

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.

  1. sea

Word origin

Derived from ים (yâm) (H3220) — sea.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 2770


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.

יָם

  • (b. h.) sea, lake, reservoir. Ber. 54ᵇ יורדי הים seafarers (on landing). B. Bath. 74ᵇ יַמָּהּ של טבריא the Lake of Tiberias; ים הגדול the Mediterranean Ocean. Gitt. 8ᵃ ים אוקיינוס; (Tosef. Ter. II, 14; a. e. only אוק׳).—Bekh. 13ᵇ, a. fr. ים המלח the Dead Sea; a. fr.—Pl. יַמִּים, B. Bath. l. c.; a. fr.—Esp. a) the cosmetic paint bottle. Cant. R. to I, 3, v. זַכְרוּת.—b) יַם נפה the receiver of flour at sifting or in the mill. Kel. XV, 3; (Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. V, 5 only נפה). Zab. IV, 2 (only הים).—c) the receptacle in the wine or oil press, tank. B. Bath. IV, 5.—d) the water reservoir in the Solomonic Temple. Zeb. 62ᵇ; Yoma 58ᵇ; a. e.—Fem. form: יַמָּה. Y. Shek. V, 48ᵈ לְיַמָּתִי (I offer a sacrifice) for my yammah, סברין מימר שופעת כים they thought she meant that she had a hemorrhage (flowing like a sea), אמר לון בימה סכנת said he to us, she was in danger on sea; Men. 64ᵇ, v. זִיבָה).

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 H3221 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
יַמָּ֑/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 7:3 1
לְ/יַמָּ֥/א Particle, Definite Article Daniel 7:2 1

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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.