כָּסַח
to cut down
also: cut away, cut off 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3683 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 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.
כסח (kâçach) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to cut down.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Psalms, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. It first appears in Psalms 80:16. Ranging over 2 senses, its meaning includes “cut away” and “cut off”. 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 H3683 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.
- #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 →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Cut up 1×, Is cut down 1×
- American Standard Version: Cut down 1×, Is cut down 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cut down 1×, Has been cut down 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cut down 1×, Is cut down 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3683 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3683 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3683 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3683 across 2 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.
- to cut down, cut away, cut off (of plants)
- (Qal) cut away (passive participle)
Word origin
[ כָּסַח ] vb. cut off or away, a plant
— 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
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.
כָּסַח
- to cut down, clear (of thorns, bushes &c.); to trim. Cant. R. to I, 1; Gen. R. s. 12; (Koh. R. to II, 12 כיסח Pi.). Gen. R. s. 49 למגל כּוֹסֶחֶת וכ׳ like a scythe cutting thorns and not being satisfied &c.; a. fr.—Part. pass. כָּסוּחַ, pl. כְּסוּחִים, כְּסוּחִין. Y. Maasr. III, 50ᵈ bot. קוצין כ׳ כָּסַחְתִּי (not כסיחין) I cut mowed thorns, i.e. I only put to death doomed culprits; Pesik. B’shall., p. 92ᵃ כוסים כוסחים (corr. acc.), v. כּוֹס II.
- same. Kil. II, 5 אם נכש או כ׳ if he weeded or cut. Shebi. II, 10 אין מְכַסְּחִין you must not cut (trim) rice plants (in the Sabbath year). Y. Shek. V, beg. 48ᶜ הראשונים … כִּיסְּחוּ וכ׳ our predecessors sowed …, cleared …, yet we have nothing to eat, i.e. they did their utmost for the Law, but we do not profit by their labors. Sifra B’ḥuck. Par. 2, ch. V כיסת, כיסה ed. Weiss (corr. acc.); a. e.
כְּסַח
- Targ. O. Lev. XXV, 3, sq.; a. e.—Snh. 26ᵃ. [Y. Sabb. VI, end, 8ᵈ קריב למכסח, v. מוֹכְסָא.]
- same. Targ. Ps. LXXX, 13.
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 H3683 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כְּסוּחִ֖ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 33:12 | 1 |
| כְּסוּחָ֑ה | Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 80:16 | 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.
