כֶּ֫סֶת
band
also: fillet, covered amulets, false phylacteries fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 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 H3704 appears — 2 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.
Ezekiel 2 verses
- Ezekiel 13:18 כְּסָת֜וֹת n c fp and say, Thus says the Lord Yahweh: Woe to the women who sew pillows on all elbows, and make kerchiefs for the head of [persons of] every stature to hunt souls! Will you hunt the souls of my people, and save souls alive for yourselves?
- Ezekiel 13:20 כִּסְּתוֹתֵי/כֶ֨נָה֙ n c fp cs + sfx pers 2fp Therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh: Behold, I am against your pillows, with which you there hunt the souls to make [them] fly, and I will tear them from your arms; and I will let the souls go, even the souls who you hunt to make [them] fly.
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.
The Hebrew noun כסת centers on the idea of “band.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Ezekiel (100%). First canonically at Ezekiel 13:18, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses — beyond “band” it also covers “fillet”, “covered amulets”, and “false phylacteries”. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3704 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.
- 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 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezekiel 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Behold i am against your pillows 1×, Pillows 1×
- American Standard Version: Behold 1×, Pillows 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Magic charms 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Magic charms 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3704 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3704 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3704 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3704 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- band, fillet, covered amulets, false phylacteries
- used by false prophetesses in Israel to support their demonic fortune-telling schemes
Word origin
[ כֶּ֫סֶת ] n.f. band, fillet (= charm or amulet), only pl.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כסה (kâçâh) (H3680) — to cover.
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.
כֶּסֶת
- 1. bag, bolster, cushion. Mikv. X, 2 הכר והכ׳ של עור mattress and pillow cases of leather; כ׳ עגולה a round cushion (closed all around). Ber. VIII, 3; Tosef. ib. VI (V), 3 על הכ׳ on the cushion (whereon the diner reclines); a. fr.—Pl. כְּסָתוֹת. Gitt. 56ᵃ. Kil. IX, 2; a. fr.—כִּסִּיּוֹת, כִּיסִּ׳. Tosef. Zab. IV, 4 מוטל על ה׳ כ׳ stretched on five (separated) bolsters; Zab. IV, 4 (Talm. ed. כסאות, ed. Dehr. כסיות).
- 2. (trnsf.) thick flesh.—Pl. כְּסָתוֹת. Bekh. 45ᵃ כ׳ calves. Gen. R. s. 17; Koh. R. to III, 19 לתחתיתו כ׳ thick flesh of the ischium; Yalk. Koh. 969 כסות (corr. acc.).
- 3. הכ׳, Hakkeseth, surname of one Ben Tsitsith. Gitt. l. c. [כסת, Sifra B’ḥuck. Par. 2, ch. V, v. כָּסַח.]
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 H3704 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כְּסָת֜וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 13:18 | 1 |
| כִּסְּתוֹתֵי/כֶ֨נָה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 13:20 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3704, 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
- כסא keçeʼ H3677 full moon
- כסא kiççêʼ H3678 throne
- כסוי kâçûwy H3681 covering
- כסות kᵉçûwth H3682 covering
- מכסה mikçeh H4372 covering
- מכסה mᵉkaççeh H4374 covering
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
