כֵּרָה
feast
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
- 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.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3740 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.
2 Kings 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.
כרה — transliterated kêrâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “feast.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in 2 Kings. A true hapax — its single appearance is 2 Kings 6:23. It shares a root with כרה and שכר. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3740 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
- 2 Kings 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: Provision 1×
- American Standard Version: Provision 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Them 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: A 1×, Provision 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3740 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3740 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3740 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3740 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.
- feast
Word origin
n.f. a feast, 2 K 6:23 (v. foregoing).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כרה (kârâh) (H3739) — to trade.
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.
כֵּירָה
- a circle, esp. banquet. B. Bath. 75ᵃ (expl. יכרו Job XL, 30, with ref. to II Kings VI, 23) אין כ׳ אלא סעודה kerah means banquet. e.g. Job 40:30
כָּרָה
- , v. כרי
כֵּרָה
- , v. כֵּירָה
כְּרַהּ
- (v. כרח) to shrink, be narrow, (with or sub. רוחא) to be ill-tempered.—Part. כְּרִי, f. כַּרְיָא (= כריה, כריהא); pl. כְּרִין. Targ. Prov. XIV, 17; 29 דכ׳ רוחיה (h. text קצר רוח, קצר אפים).—ענבי דכְרִין grapes which shrunk, undeveloped (blackish) grapes. Naz. 34ᵇ, a. e., v. כְּרוּם ch.
- to be ill. Targ. Prov. XXIII, 35.
כרי
- (b. h.) [to round, heap, cave,]
- 1. to dig. Mekh. Mishp., N’zikin, s. 11 כּוֹרֶה מנין how am I to know that he who digs a pit is responsible?—B. Kam. 51ᵃ כורה אחר כורה one who digs after another one, i.e. who completes the pit to its legal size. Succ. 53ᵃ; Macc. 11ᵃ בשעה שכ׳ דוד וכ׳ when David dug for the foundations; a. fr.—Part. pass. כָּרוּי, f. כְּרוּיָה hollowed out. Kel. III, 5, a. e., v. חִידּוּק a. בָּרָה.
- 2. to sit in a circle, v. infra.
- 1. to heap, pile. Gen. R. s. 100 (ref. to כריתי, Gen. L, 5) הרבה ממון תַּכְרֶה עליה much money shalt thou pile up (give me) for it (the grave); (some ed. הכרה Jacob piled up in settling with Esau). Ib. הִכְרֵתִי (corr. הִכְרֵיתִי); v. כְּרִי; Pesik. R. s. 1 וכל ממון שהיה לו ה׳ וכ׳ (not מסר לו) and he (Jacob) piled up whatever money he had to place it before Esau &c. e.g. Genesis 50:5
- 2. to invite to a banquet;
- 3. (with play on כרת) to excise, to destroy. Snh. 20ᵃ; Yalk. Sam. 142 (ref. to להברות, II Sam. III, 35, where Raba had before him a K’thib. להכרות) כתיב להכרות … בתחלה להַכְרוֹתוֹ וכ׳ it is written l’hakhroth (to entertain) and read l’habroth (v. בָּרָה): originally they came with the intention of destroying him (for the murder of Abner), and finally (when convinced of his innocence) they came to comfort him; [Yalk. Ms. to Sam. l. c., quoted in Rabb. D. S. Snh. l. c. note 9: כתיב לִבְרוֹת וקרינן להַבְרוֹת בתחלה לברות וכ׳ it is written libroth (to pierce, cmp. Ez. XXIII, 47), and we read l’habroth &c.]. e.g. 2 Samuel 3:35
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 H3740, 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
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.
