כַּרְכֹּם
saffron
‘saffron’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3750 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.
Song of Solomon 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.
כרכם (karkôm) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “saffron.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Song of Solomon, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Found nowhere else but Song of Solomon 4:14. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3750 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
- Song of Solomon 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Saffron 1×
- American Standard Version: Saffron 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Saffron 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Saffron 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3750 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3750 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3750 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3750 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- saffron
- an orange-yellow flower of the crocus family, used for flavouring
Word origin
כַּרְכֹּם n.[m.] saffron;— Ct 4:14
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: probably of foreign origin
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.
כִּרְכִּם
- (reduplic. of כרם)
- 1. to draw a circle; denom. כַּרְכּוֹם II.
- 2. (cmp. כְּרוּם) to paint, varnish; to polish, bronze. Kel. XV, 2 סירקן או כִרְכְּמָן if he painted or varnished the boards. Ib. XXII, 9 כופת שסירקו או כִרְכְּמוֹ וכ׳ a block which one painted or varnished so as to give it a distinguishable surface. Ḥull. 25ᵇ לכַרְכֵּם Ar. to polish or bronze (metal vessels), v. כִּרְכֵּב. Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. VI, 1 ואם … לכרכם עד שיְכַרְכֵּם if he intends to varnish (the leather goods), they cannot become unclean until he has varnished them. Cant. R. beg. סיתתה וכִירְכְּמָהּ he chiseled and polished the stone, v. מָרַק.—כ׳ פנים [to braze the face,] to be bold, defiant (cmp. יָרַק). Y’lamd. to Num. XX, 8 quot. in Ar. והוא מְכִרְכֵּם פניו כנגדן (some ed. Ar. מכרכס, (v. Koh. Ar. Compl. s. v.) and he (Moses) defied them; Yalk. Num. 763 נִתְכַּרְכְּמוּ פניו, v. infra.—Part. pass. מְכוּרְכָּם פנים מְכוּרְכָּמוֹת; green, pale face. Gen. R. s. 99 יצאו ופניהם מכ׳ they went out pale-faced (abashed).—Denom. כַּרְכּוֹם I.
- (denom. of כַּרְכּוֹם I, cmp. יָרַק), with פנים
- 1. to look saffron-like, pale, abashed, grieved. Gen. R. s. 20 נִתְכַּרְכְּמוּ פניו he turned pale. Y. Snh. I, 19ᵃ bot. Pesik. Par. p. 38ᵃ; Num. R. s. 19 (some ed. נתכרמו, corr. acc.).—Midr. Till. to Ps. XVIII, 35 ופניו מִתְכַּרְכְּמִין and his (Abraham’s) face turned pale (from jealousy); Yalk. Sam. 162 ופני אברהם מִתְכַּרְכְּמוֹת.
- 2. to become bronze-colored. Cant. R. to I, 6 נתכ׳ פניו his face was tanned (from exposure to the sun; Yalk. ib. 982 נפחם).
- 3. to become angry, defiant. Yalk. Num. 763, v. supra.
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.
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.
