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יַקִּיר

rare

also: noble, famous, difficult fuller range ↓

H3358 Strong's Hebrew
yaqqîyr Transliteration
/yak-keer'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

Compare with another word →

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, יקיר (yaqqîyr) means “rare.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Ezra (50%), then Daniel. Scripture first uses it in Ezra 4:10. Ranging over 3 senses, its meaning includes “noble”, “famous”, and “difficult”. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
noble
Modern gloss
rare
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H3358 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.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ezra 4:10
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Ezra 4:10.
Daniel 2:11
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Daniel 2:11.
#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 1 · 50%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 50%

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: Is a rare 1×, Noble 1×
  • American Standard Version: Is a rare 1×, Noble 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Honorable 1×, Is so difficult 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Is difficult 1×, Noble 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H3358 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Is a rare” 1×
  • “Noble” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H3358 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Is a rare” 1×
  • “Noble” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H3358 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Honorable” 1×
  • “Is so difficult” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H3358 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Is difficult” 1×
  • “Noble” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 3 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.

  1. rare, noble, famous, difficult
  2. honourable
  3. difficult (metonymy)

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 יקיר (yaqqîyr) (H3357) — precious.

Part of speech: Adjective TWOT: 2775a


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.


Forms in the corpus

The 2 distinct written forms H3358 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
וְ/יַקִּירָ֔/א Particle, Definite Article Ezra 4:10 1
יַקִּירָ֔ה Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Daniel 2:11 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).

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