יַקִּיר
precious
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3357 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.
Jeremiah 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.
The Hebrew adjective יקיר centers on the idea of “precious.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (100%). A true hapax — its single appearance is Jeremiah 31:20. It clusters with יקר, יקר and יקר under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3357 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
- Jeremiah 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.
- 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: Dear 1×
- American Standard Version: Dear 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Precious 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3357 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3357 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3357 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- rare, very precious, honour, dear
Word origin
adj. intrans. very precious, dear; only הֲבֵן יַקִּיר לִי אֶפְרַיִם Je 31:20 is Ephraim a very precious son unto me? (‖ יֶלֶד שַׁעֲשׁוּעִים).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יקר (yâqar) (H3365) — to be precious.
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.
יַקִּיר
- weighty, honorable.—Pl. יַקִּירִים. Yoma VI, 4 מיַקִּירֵי ירושלים some of the nobility of Jerusalem.
יַקִּיר ²
- ch, same,
- 1. heavy. Targ. Ps. XXXVIII, 5 (some ed. יקר). Targ. Prov. XXVII, 3.—Targ. O. Ex. IV, 10; VI, 12 י׳ ממלל heavy of speech.—Sabb. 59ᵃ די׳ when the shoe is too heavy for running.
- 2. dear, precious. Targ. Ps. XXXVI, 8 (ed. Lag. יקר); a. fr.—Y. Kidd. I, 58ᵈ כספא זליל כספא י׳ silver falls or rises in price (copper being the standard) נחשא י׳ וכ׳ it is copper that falls or rises (silver being the standard). Y. Ab. Zar. V, 44ᵈ אין הוה עילויה י׳ if the higher price (paid for Jewish wine) is very great; a. e.
- 3. honored, worthy. Targ. Deut. XXVIII, 58.—Koh. R. to XI, 1 וי׳ מאומתך and worthier than the rest of thy people; a. e.—Pl. יַקִּירִין, יַקִּירִי. Targ. Is. XXIII, 8, sq. Targ. Ez. III, 5. Targ. Num. XXII, 15; a. e.—B. Mets. 21ᵇ אגב די׳ because they are weighty; a. fr.—Fem. יַקִּירָא, יַקִּירְתָּא. Targ. Prov. III, 15. Ib. VI, 26; a. e.—Pl. יַקִּירָתָא. Targ. II Chr. XXXII, 27 (ed. Lag. יקרתא). Targ. Is. III, 17 יְקִירַת וכ׳ ed. Lag. (oth. ed. יִקְרַת) the nobles of the daughters &c.
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 H3357, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 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.
