כַּפְתּוֹר
Caphtor
BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Caphtor’ 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 H3731 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Amos 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.
כפתר (Kaphtôr) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Caphtor.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. Deuteronomy dominates its distribution — 1 of 3 verses. Debuting at Deuteronomy 2:23, it then recurs through the corpus. For the data behind this summary, explore 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3731 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 33%
- Jeremiah 1 verse 33%
- Amos 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Caphtor 3×
- American Standard Version†: Caphtor 3×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Caphtor 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Caphtor 1×, Crete 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3731 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3731 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3731 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3731 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
כפתר I 1. capital, 2. knob, bulb (2. perhaps earlier meaning
- 1. כַּפְתּוֹר Am 9:1 capital of pillar; so pl. sf. כַּפְתֹּרֶיהָ Zp 2:14. e.g. Amos 9:1
- 2. כַּפְתֹּר, knob or bulb, ornament on the golden lamp-stand in tabernacle; 𝔊 σφαιρωτήρ, Jos Archaeology iii. 6, 7 ῥοΐσκος, small pomegranate; 𝔙 sphaerula:—Ex 25:33(×2), 35(×3) = 37:19(×2), 21(×3); sf. כַּפְתֹּרֶיהָ 25:31, 34 = 37:17, 20, כַּפְתֹּרֵיהֶם 25:36 = 37:22 (all P). e.g. Exodus 25:33
כפתר II ob. Crete, so Ew Kiep Di Gn 10
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
I. n.m. 1. capital, 2. knob, bulb (2. perhaps earlier meaning; HoffmZAW iii. (1883), 124, comp. Syriac ܟܡܬܪܐ pear (LöwNo. 153), from shape);—
II. n.pr.terr prob. Crete, so Ew Kiep Di Gn 10:14 Gie Je 47:4 al.; cf. A. J. Evans Cretan Pictographs (1895), 100 ff.; (> 𝔊 𝔖 𝔙 𝔗 Cappadocia, certainly wrong; Mich Cyprus; EbÄgM 127 ff. al. the coast of the Nile-Delta; WMMAs. Eu. 387 f. Philistines, originally pirates from SW. coast of Asia Minor, and the Ægean islands);—כַּפְתּוֹר Am 9:7 (orig. home of Philistines), כַּפְתֹּר Dt 2:23 (home of Caphtorim, v. infr.); שְׁאֵרִית אִי כַּפְתֹּר Je 47:4 the rest of the coast-land of Caphtor.—Vid. also כְּרֵתִי infr.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כפתר (kaphtôr) (H3730) — capital.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms H3731 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כַפְתּֽוֹר | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 47:4 | 1 |
| מִ/כַּפְתּ֔וֹר | Noun, Proper | Deuteronomy 2:23 | 1 |
| מִ/כַּפְתּ֖וֹר | Noun, Proper | Amos 9:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3731, 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
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Caphtor). 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
A chaplet, the original seat of the Philistines (Deut. 2:23; Jer. 47:4; Amos 9:7). The name is found written in hieroglyphics in the temple of Kom Ombos in Upper Egypt. But the exact situation of Caphtor is unknown, though it is supposed to be Crete, since the Philistines seem to be meant by the "Cherethites" in 1 Sam. 30:14 (see also 2 Sam. 8:18). It may, however, have been a part of Egypt, the Caphtur in the north Delta, since the Caphtorim were of the same race as the Mizraite people (Gen. 10:14; 1 Chr. 1:12).
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
a sphere, buckle, or hand
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
