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יָעָה

to sweep

H3261 Strong's Hebrew
yâʻâh Transliteration
/yaw-aw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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.

At its core, יעה (yâʻâh) means “to sweep.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Isaiah (100%). Found nowhere else but Isaiah 28:17. It clusters with יע, יעואל and יעיאל under a shared root. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
sweep away
Modern gloss
to sweep
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 H3261 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.
Isaiah 28:17
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Isaiah 28:17.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 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 1 distinct verse.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Shall sweep away 1×
  • American Standard Version: Shall sweep away 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Will sweep away 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: But 1×, Will sweep away 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H3261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Shall sweep away” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H3261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Shall sweep away” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H3261 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Will sweep away” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H3261 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “But” 1×
  • “Will sweep away” 1×

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. (Qal) to sweep, sweep away, sweep together

Word origin

יָעָה vb. sweep together (with collat. idea of carrying away )— Qal Is 28:17

— 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

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 879


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3261, 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

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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). 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.

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.