כָּרַם
vinedresser
‘vinedresser’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3755 appears — 5 distinct verses across 5 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.
2 Kings 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Joel 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.
כרם — transliterated kôrêm — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “vinedresser.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Debuting at 2 Kings 25:12, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. From the same root come כרם, כרמל and כרמי. 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 H3755 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Kings 1 verse 20%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 20%
- Isaiah 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 80%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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: Vinedressers 2×
- American Standard Version: Be vinedressers 2×, Vinedressers 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Vinedressers 3×, Tend the vineyards 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Vinedressers 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3755 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3755 across 5 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3755 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3755 across 4 tagged occurrences — 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.
- to tend vines or vineyards, to dress vines or vineyards
- (Qal) vinedressers (participle)
Word origin
כָּרַם vb. denom. tend vineyards, dress vines, only Qal Pt. pl. vinedressers
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כרם (kerem) (H3754) — vineyard.
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.
כָּרַם
- (v. כָּרָה)
- 1. to surround, cut off. Denom. כֶּרֶם, כַּרְמְלִית, כַּרְכּוֹם II.
- 2. to pile up. Kel. XXIII, 4 the washer’s chair שהוא כוֹרֵם עליו את הכלים (ed. Dehr. כּוֹרֵס) upon which he piles the clothes (to press them); Tosef. Kel. B. Bath. II, 9 שמוכרין ed. Zuck. (oth. ed. שמוכרים, read: שכּוֹרְמִ׳); Sabb. 88ᵇ (play on כרמי עין גדי Cant. I, 14) עון גדי שכָּרַמְתִּי לי וכ׳ the guilt of the kid (= golden calf; oth. opin. גַּדִּי the idol Gad) which I piled (stored up) for me (for future punishment). Ib. מאי … כרמי לישנא דמכניש הוא (Ms. M. כרם … דמכמש, Ms. O. דמכבש, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) what evidence is there that the word Kerem has the meaning of gathering (or of pressing, preserving)?—Answ. (by ref. to Kel. l. c.) שכּוֹרְמִים עליו את הכלים. e.g. Song of Solomon 1:14
- 3. to cover, paint, v. כְּרוּם, כַּרְכּוֹם I.—[Tosef. Men. IX, 10 וכורמין Var., v. כָּמַר.]
כֶּרֶם
- preced.) [enclosure,] plantation, esp. vineyard. Ber. 35ᵃ, a. e. כ׳ זית איקרי כ׳ סתמא לא אקרי an orchard of olive trees is called kerem zayith, but not plain kerem. Ib. (ref. to Maas. Sh. V, 1 sq., a. fr.) חד תני כ׳ רבע … נטע רבעי one authority reads everywhere a kerem of the fourth year’s crop, the other nʾtʿa (plantation) &c. Lev. R. s. 32 (play on כְּרֻם, Ps. XII, 9) כַּרְמָן של ממזרים the plantation (genealogy, cmp. יִחוּס) of the bastards. Peah VII, 6. Kil. IV, 1, v. קָרַחַת; a. v. fr.—Trnsf. circle of scholars, college, esp. כ׳ ביבנה the college of R. Johanan b. Zaccai in Jamnia (v. יַבְנֶה). Keth. IV, 6; B. Bath. 131ᵇ; Y. Ber. IV, 7ᵈ top; a. fr.—[Ber. 63ᵇ כ׳ ביבנה for which Cant. R. to II, 5: אוּשָׁא.]—Pl. כְּרָמִים. Men. VIII, 6 (86ᵇ) כ׳ העבודים carefully cultivated vineyards (dug over twice a year); a. e.—בֵּית כֶּרֶם pr. n. pl. Beth-Kerem. Nidd. II, 7 בקעת ב׳ כ׳ the valley of Beth K. (whose soil was red); Tosef. ib. III, 11. e.g. Psalms 12:9
כְּרָם
- Targ. Ex. XXII, 4; a. fr.—B. Mets. 104ᵃ; B. Bath. 7ᵃ if one says (כרם) כרמא אני מוכר לך וכ׳ ‘I sell thee a vineyard’, although there are no vines in it &c.; והוא דמתקרי כ׳ provided the property goes by the name of vineyard (Karma); a. fr.—Yeb. 42ᵇ ממתניתן דכ׳ וכ׳ he changed his opinion on account of what had been taught in the college (at Jamnia), v. preced.—[Yeb. 121ᵃ בכרמא, v. כַּרְמִי.]—Pl. כַּרְמִין, כַּרְמַיָּא, כַּרְמֵי. Targ. Deut. VI, 11. Targ. Jud. XV, 5. Targ. Koh. II, 4 כ׳ ביבנה schools, (v. preced.); a. fr.—Y. Kil. IV, beg. 29ᵃ, v. next w.—Succ. 44ᵇ, v. קַשְׁקֵשׁ.
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 5 distinct written forms H3755 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/כֹֽרְמִ֗ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 26:10 | 1 |
| וְ/כֹרְמֵי/כֶֽם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 61:5 | 1 |
| כֹּֽרְמִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Joel 1:11 | 1 |
| לְ/כֹֽרְמִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Kings 25:12 | 1 |
| לְ/כֹרְמִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 52:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3755, 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
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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
