כָּסַם
to cut
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
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- 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).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 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 H3697 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.
Ezekiel 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.
כסם (kâçam) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to cut.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. Ezekiel dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Ezekiel 44:20. Related forms include כסמת and כרסם. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3697 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.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezekiel 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: Poll 1×, They shall only 1×
- American Standard Version: They shall only 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Must carefully trim 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hair of their heads 1×, They must trim 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3697 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3697 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3697 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3697 across 2 tagged occurrences — 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 cut, clip, trim, shear
Word origin
[ כָּסַם ] vb. shear, clip:—only Qal Ez 44:20
— 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.
סַם
- cmp. Arab. samma, to penetrate) drug (healing or deleterious); medicine; poison; paint. Sabb. XII, 4 כתב בדיו בסם וכ׳ if one wrote (on the Sabbath) with ink, with a paint (orpiment or sandaracha) &c. Lam. R. to II, 11, v. דִּמְעָה. Ḥull. III, 5 אבלה סם המות if the animal is known to have swallowed a deadly poison; ib. 58ᵇ סם המות דבהמה what is deadly to animals, דאדם what is deadly to man. B. Kam. 85ᵃ כמה … בין סייף לסם how much a person condemned by the government to have his hand cut off would pay for the difference (in pain) between the plain operation with the sword and that performed under the influence of a drug (mandrake, v. Plin. H. N. XXV, 150). Yoma 72ᵇ (play on שָׂם, Deut. IV, 44) זכה … סם חיים וכ׳ if he applies his learning rightly, it becomes to him a medicine of life, if not, a deadly poison. Kidd. 30ᵇ (play on ושמתם, Deut. XI, 18) סם תם an unfailing remedy; Sifré Deut. 45; a. fr.—Pl. סַמִּים. Gen. R. s. 10 (fr. Ben Sira) אלוה העלה ס׳ וכ׳ God made drugs come forth out of the earth, with them the physician heals …, and out of them the druggist produces poisonous drugs. Ker. 6ᵇ; a. e. e.g. Deuteronomy 4:44
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 H3697 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִכְסְמ֖וּ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Ezekiel 44:20 | 1 |
| כָּס֥וֹם | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Absolute | Ezekiel 44:20 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3697, 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
Compare all same-root words → 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.
