כָּסַל
to be foolish
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H3688 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.
כסל — transliterated kâçal — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to be foolish.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. It occurs only once, in Jeremiah 10:8. It shares a root with כסיל, כסל and סכל. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3688 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: Foolish 1×
- American Standard Version: Foolish 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Foolish 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Foolish 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3688 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3688 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3688 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3688 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.
- (Qal) to be foolish, be stupid
Word origin
[ כָּסַל ] vb. be or become stupid — Qal Je 10:8
— 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.
כֶּסֶל
- c. (b. h.;
- 1. [incision,] groin, loin.—Bekh. 40ᵃ, v. כָּסוּל. Yalk. Gen. 133 (quot. fr. Midr. Vayisu) בכסא ימנית (corr. acc.) in the right loin.—Pl. כְּסָלִים, כְּסָלִין. Tosef. Bekh. IV, 10 [read:] כל שכְּסָלָיו יוצאין a kasul is one whose loins protrude. Sabb. 31ᵇ וישׁ להם חלב על הכ׳ Ar. (ed. כִּסְלָם) and yet have fat on the groins (are careless).—Trnsf.
- 2. (cmp. טפש) laziness, inactivity;
- 3. trust;
- 4. thought. Yalk. Num. 742; Yalk. Ps. 819 quot. fr. Y’lamd. (v. Ar. s. v. כסל) כִּסְלָם … מחשבתם וכ׳ kislam (Ps. LXXVIII, 7) means their thought, as we read (Lev. III, 4, cmp. כִּלְיָה) ‘that which is by the loins’; (oth. opin.) טיפשותן it means their inactivity, as it is said (Koh. IV, 5) &c.; (oth. opin.) בטחונן their trust as we read (Job XXXI, 24) &c. e.g. Psalms 78:7
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 H3688, 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 → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 3 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
