מְאֵרָה
curse
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (60%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, 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 H3994 appears — 5 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Proverbs 2 verses
Malachi 2 verses
- Malachi 2:2 הַ/מְּאֵרָ֔ה ptcl def.art + n c fs If you will not listen, and if you will not lay it to heart, to give glory to my name," says Yahweh of Hosts, "then will I send the curse on you, and I will curse your blessings. Indeed, I have cursed them already, because you do not lay it to heart.
- Malachi 3:9 בַּ/מְּאֵרָה֙ prep det + n c fs You are cursed with the curse; for you rob me, even this whole nation.
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 noun מארה centers on the idea of “curse.” A scarce word — 5 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Proverbs (40%), then Malachi and Deuteronomy. Debuting at Deuteronomy 28:20, it then recurs through the corpus. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3994 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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
- Proverbs 2 verses 40%
- Malachi 2 verses 40%
- Deuteronomy 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) 2 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 40%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Curse 4×
- American Standard Version: Curse 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Curse 3×, Curses 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Curse 2×, Curses 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3994 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3994 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 H3994 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3994 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.
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.
- curse
Word origin
Derived from ארר (ʼârar) (H779) — to curse.
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.
מְאֵרָה
- curse, evil; decrease, destruction, opp. בְּרָכָה. Ber. 20ᵇ תבא מ׳ וכ׳ curse (poverty) will come upon him &c.; Y. Dem. II, 22ᵈ bot.; Y. Peah V, end, 19ᵃ. Y. Snh. X, 28ᵇ; ib. 29ᵈ נשלטה בהן מ׳ (not ושלטה) curse (poverty) was given power over them. Tanḥ. B’resh. 11 מה אנו מולידות למ׳ why should we give birth for curse (to see our offspring perish)?; Gen. R. s. 23. Gen. R. s. 34.—Sifra Thazr., Par. 5, ch. XIV (ref. to ממארת, Lev. XIII, 51) תן בו מ׳ וכ׳ put a curse on it (the garment) that no use be made thereof. Bets. 15ᵇ הללו בעלי מ׳ these (being the last to leave) are poor men. Tosef. Kidd. I, 11 תהא לה מ׳ (Var. מורא) she will be cursed; a. fr.—Pl. מְאֵרוֹת, מְאֵי׳. Tosef. B. Bath. VI, 2 עשר מ׳ למאה (ed. Zuck. מרים לסאה) ten spoiled (bitter) pumpkins out of each hundred. e.g. Leviticus 13:51
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 H3994 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּ/מְּאֵרָה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Malachi 3:9 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּאֵרָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Malachi 2:2 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּאֵרָ֤ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 28:20 | 1 |
| מְאֵרַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 3:33 | 1 |
| מְאֵרֽוֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Proverbs 28:27 | 1 |
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.
