אַכְזָרִי
cruel
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H394 appears — 8 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.
Proverbs 4 verses
- Proverbs 5:9 לְ/אַכְזָרִֽי prep + Adjective Adjective ms Lest you give your honor to others, And your years to the cruel one;
- Proverbs 11:17 אַכְזָרִֽי adj Adjective ms The merciful man does good to his own soul, But he who is cruel troubles his own flesh.
- Proverbs 12:10 אַכְזָרִֽי adj Adjective ms A righteous man regards the life of his animal, But the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.
- Proverbs 17:11 אַ֝כְזָרִ֗י adj Adjective ms An evil man seeks only rebellion; Therefore a cruel messenger shall be sent against him.
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 3 verses
- Jeremiah 6:23 אַכְזָרִ֥י adj Adjective ms They lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel, and have no mercy; their voice roars like the sea, and they ride on horses, everyone set in array, as a man to the battle, against you, daughter of Zion.
- Jeremiah 30:14 אַכְזָרִ֔י adj Adjective ms All your lovers have forgotten you; they don't seek you: for I have wounded you with the wound of an enemy, with the chastisement of a cruel one, for the greatness of your iniquity, because your sins were increased.
- Jeremiah 50:42 אַכְזָרִ֥י adj Adjective ms They lay hold on bow and spear; they are cruel, and have no mercy; their voice roars like the sea; and they ride on horses, everyone set in array, as a man to the battle, against you, daughter of Babylon.
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.
The Hebrew adjective אכזרי centers on the idea of “cruel.” The word gravitates to Proverbs (50%), then Jeremiah and Isaiah. It turns up in 8 verses across 3 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is Proverbs 5:9. It shares a root with אכזר and אכזריות. 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 H394 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
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 8 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 50%
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: Cruel 2×, They are cruel 2×
- American Standard Version: Cruel 2×, They are cruel 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cruel 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cruel 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H394 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H394 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H394 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H394 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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.
- cruel
Word origin
adj. cruel, always in this form;—Pr 12:10; 17:11 Je 6:23; 50:42, also 30:14 (read מוּסָר א׳, for MT מוּסַר, Gf Gie); as subst. Pr 5:9; 11:17, perhaps also, in appos. with יוֹם י׳, Is 13:9.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אכזר (ʼakzâr) (H393) — cruel.
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.
אַכְזָרִי
- , אַכְזָרִית f. (b. h., cruel, merciless; also strictly just. Koh. R. to VII, 16; a. e. B. Bath. 16ᵃ bot.—Pl. אַכְזְרִיִּים, אַכְזָרִים; fem. אַכְזְרִיֹּות. Pesik. R. s. 44. Num. R. s. 8. [Num. R. s. 9 מדת אכזרית, read אַכְזְרִיּוּת.]
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 H394 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אַכְזָרִ֥י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 13:9 | 3 |
| אַכְזָרִֽי | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 11:17 | 2 |
| אַ֝כְזָרִ֗י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 17:11 | 1 |
| אַכְזָרִ֔י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 30:14 | 1 |
| לְ/אַכְזָרִֽי | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 5:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H394, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
