יִתְרוֹ
Jethro
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Jethro’ fuller range ↓
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H3503 appears — 9 distinct verses 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.
Exodus 9 verses
- Exodus 3:1 יִתְר֥וֹ n Proper Now Moses was keeping the flock of Jethro, his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the back of the wilderness, and came to God's mountain, to Horeb.
- Exodus 4:18 יִתְר֛וֹ n Proper Moses went and returned to Jethro his father-in-law, and said to him, "Please let me go and return to my brothers who are in Egypt, and see whether they are still alive." Jethro said to Moses, "Go in peace."
- Exodus 18:1 יִתְר֨וֹ n Proper Now Jethro, the priest of Midian, Moses' father-in-law, heard of all that God had done for Moses, and for Israel his people, how that Yahweh had brought Israel out of Egypt.
- Exodus 18:2 יִתְרוֹ֙ n Proper Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, received Zipporah, Moses' wife, after he had sent her away,
- Exodus 18:5 יִתְר֨וֹ n Proper Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, came with his sons and his wife to Moses into the wilderness where he was encamped, at the Mountain of God.
- Exodus 18:6 יִתְר֖וֹ n Proper He said to Moses, I, your father-in-law Jethro, have come to you with your wife, and her two sons with her.
- Exodus 18:9 יִתְר֔וֹ n Proper Jethro rejoiced for all the goodness which Yahweh had done to Israel, in that he had delivered them out of the hand of the Egyptians.
- Exodus 18:10 יִתְרוֹ֒ n Proper Jethro said, "Blessed be Yahweh, who has delivered you out of the hand of the Egyptians, and out of the hand of Pharaoh; who has delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians.
- Exodus 18:12 יִתְר֨וֹ n Proper Jethro, Moses' father-in-law, took a burnt offering and sacrifices for God. Aaron came with all of the elders of Israel, to eat bread with Moses' father-in-law before God.
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, יתרו (Yithrôw) means “Jethro.” Its uses cluster heavily in Exodus (100% of all occurrences). With 9 verses in 1 book, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Exodus 3:1. Dig into 9-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3503 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 9 verses 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 9 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 9 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: Jethro 9×
- American Standard Version: Jethro 7×
- Berean Standard Bible: Jethro 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Jethro 9×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3503 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3503 across 9 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3503 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3503 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 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.
- Jethro = "his abundance"
- father-in-law of Moses; also 'Jether'
Word origin
n.pr.m. father of Moses’ wife Ex 3:1; 4:18 b; 18:1, 2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 12 (all E), = יֶתֶר 4:18; in all 𝔊 Ιοθορ.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יתר (yether) (H3499) — remainder.
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.
יִתְרוֹ
- (b. h.) pr. n. m. Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. Ber. 63ᵇ. Ex. R. s. 27 יֶתֶר כשהוא גוי … ונקרא י׳ as a heathen he was named Jether, and when he was converted … he was named J.—Zeb. 116ᵃ י׳ קודם מ"ת וכ׳ the arrival of J. (Ex. XVIII) took place before the giving of the Law; Ab. Zar. 24ᵃ; a. v. fr. e.g. Exodus 18:10
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 7 distinct written forms H3503 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִתְר֨וֹ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 18:1 | 3 |
| יִתְר֔וֹ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 18:9 | 1 |
| יִתְר֖וֹ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 18:6 | 1 |
| יִתְר֛וֹ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 4:18 | 1 |
| יִתְר֥וֹ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 3:1 | 1 |
| יִתְרוֹ֒ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 18:10 | 1 |
| יִתְרוֹ֙ | Noun, Proper | Exodus 18:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3503, 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
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 → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Jethro). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
His excellence, or gain, a prince or priest of Midian, who succeeded his father Reuel. Moses spent forty years after his exile from the Egyptian court as keeper of Jethro's flocks. While the Israelites were encamped at Sinai, and soon after their victory over Amalek, Jethro came to meet Moses, bringing with him Zipporah and her two sons. They met at the "mount of God," and "Moses told him all that the Lord had done unto Pharaoh" (Ex. 18:8). On the following day Jethro, observing the multiplicity of the duties devolving on Moses, advised him to appoint subordinate judges, rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens, to decide smaller matters, leaving only the weightier matters to be referred to Moses, to be laid before the Lord. This advice Moses adopted (Ex. 18). He was also called Hobab (q.v.), which was probably his personal name, while Jethro was an official name. (See MOSES.)
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(his excellence) was priest or prince of Midian. Moses married his daughter Zipporah. (B.C. 1530.) On account if his local knowledge he was entreated to remain with the Israelites throughout their journey to Canaan. (Numbers 10:31,33) (He is called Raguel, Or Reuel, Reuel in (Exodus 2:18) And Raguel, Or Reuel in (Numbers 10:29), The same word int he original for both). Reuel is probably his proper name, and Jethro his official title.--ED.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
his excellence; his posterity
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
