כַּשְׂדַּי
Chaldean
BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Chaldean’ 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
- Gentilic
- A noun naming a member of a people, tribe, or region of origin (e.g. an Israelite, a Moabite).
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.
- Both
- Attested as both masculine and feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where H3779 appears in the Absolute state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Daniel 4 verses
- Daniel 2:5 ל/כשדי/א לְ/כַשְׂדָּאֵ֔/י prep + n Gentilic ms det + ptcl def.art prep + n Gentilic mp + sfx pers 1cs The king answered the Chaldeans, The thing is gone from me: if you don't make known to me the dream and the interpretation of it, you shall be cut in pieces, and your houses shall be made a dunghill.
- Daniel 2:10 כשדי/א כַשְׂדָּאֵ֤/י וְ/כַשְׂדָּֽי n Gentilic ms det + ptcl def.art n Gentilic mp cs + sfx pers 1cs conj + n Gentilic bs The Chaldeans answered before the king, and said, There is not a man on the earth who can show the king's matter, because no king, lord, or ruler, has asked such a thing of any magician, or enchanter, or Chaldean.
- Daniel 3:8 כַּשְׂדָּאִ֑ין n Gentilic mp Therefore at that time certain Chaldeans came near, and brought accusation against the Jews.
- Daniel 5:11 כַּשְׂדָּאִין֙ n Gentilic mp There is a man in your kingdom, in whom is the spirit of the holy gods; and in the days of your father light and understanding and wisdom, like the wisdom of the gods, were found in him; and the king Nebuchadnezzar your father, the king, [I say], your father, made him master of the magicians, enchanters, Chaldeans, and soothsayers;
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.
כשדי (Kasday) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Chaldean.” Daniel dominates its distribution — 7 of 7 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. It first appears in Daniel 2:5. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3779 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 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: Chaldeans 7×
- American Standard Version: Chaldeans 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Astrologers 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chaldeans 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3779 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3779 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3779 across 8 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3779 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 3 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.
- Chaldean = "clod breakers"
- the inhabitants of Chaldea, living on the lower Euphrates and Tigris
- those persons considered the wisest in the land (by extension)
Word origin
Derived from כשדי (Kasdîy) (H3778) — Chaldea.
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.
כַּשְׂדִּי
- , pl.) Chaldean. Meg. 12ᵇ כלי … כשדיי the vessel which I use (my wife) is neither …, but a Chaldean.—Pl. כַּשְׂדִּים, כַּשְׂדִּיִּים. Succ. 52ᵇ. Pesik. R. s. 37 כשנפרע מן הכ׳ when the Lord punished the Chaldeans (Babylonia, v. Midr. Till. to Ps. XCIII, 1).—B. Bath. 15ᵇ. Lam. R. to I, 14 כ׳ קשה the Chaldean government was tyrannical (contrad. to בבל); a. e.—Fem. כַּשְׂדִּית, pl. כַּשְׂדִּיּוֹת. Snh. 92ᵇ
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 9 distinct written forms H3779 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כשדי/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 4:7 | 4 |
| כַּשְׂדָּאֵ֖/י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Daniel 5:7 | 2 |
| וְ/כַשְׂדָּֽי | Noun, Gentilic, Both, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 2:10 | 1 |
| כַשְׂדָּאֵ֤/י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Daniel 2:10 | 1 |
| כַשְׂדָּאָֽ/ה | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 5:30 | 1 |
| כַּשְׂדָּאִ֑ין | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 3:8 | 1 |
| כַּשְׂדָּאִין֙ | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 5:11 | 1 |
| ל/כשדי/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 2:5 | 1 |
| לְ/כַשְׂדָּאֵ֔/י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 2:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3779, 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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
