מוֹתָר
abundance
also: pre-eminence, profit, superiority 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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4195 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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 2 verses
Ecclesiastes 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.
מותר — transliterated môwthâr — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “abundance.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Proverbs. It first appears in Proverbs 14:23. It also covers “pre-eminence”, “profit”, and “superiority”, alongside “abundance” — see its full sense range. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4195 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Proverbs 2 verses 67%
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 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: Hath no preeminence 1×, Is profit 1×, Tend only to plenteousness 1×
- American Standard Version: Hath no preeminence 1×, Is profit 1×, Tend only to plenteousness 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Advantage 1×, Bring plenty 1×, Profit 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Profit 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4195 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4195 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4195 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4195 across 3 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 the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. abundance, plenty מוֹתָ֑ר Pr 14:23; 21:5 (in both opp. מַחְסוֹר). e.g. Proverbs 14:23
- 2. 2, מוֹתַר הָאָדָם מִן־הַבְּהֵמָה אָיִן Ec 3:19 the superiority of man over beast is nothing. e.g. Ecclesiastes 3:19
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.m. Pr 14:23 abundance, pre-eminence;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יתר (yâthar) (H3498) — to remain.
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.
מוּתָּר
- , v. נָתַר
מוֹתָר
- remainder, surplus. Shek. IV, 3 מוֹתַר שירי וכ׳ what remains over of the surplus fund of &c. Ib. 4. Men. 83ᵇ מ׳ הפסח what has not been used of the money (or the animals) dedicated for the Passover sacrifice; a. fr.—Pl. מוֹתְרוֹת. Y. Yoma V, beg. 42ᵇ תנאי ב"ד הוא על המ׳ וכ׳ (not תנייא) it is a silent agreement of the authorities that surpluses (from sacrificial appropriations) shall be applied to burnt-offerings. Sifra Tsav, Mill., end מוֹתְרֵיהֶם their remnants.
מוֹתָר ²
- 1. same. Targ. O. Ex. XVI, 23. Targ. Y. II, Ex. XII, 34 (h. text משארת־); a. e.—Lev. R. s. 34, end כד … מוֹתַר מלין וכ׳ when she talked a surplus of words (more than necessary) on the Sabbath.—Pl. מוֹתָרַיָּא, מוֹתָרַיָּיה. Num. R. s. 11 אילין מ׳ וכ׳ how many days (above 3000) are there?
- 2. superabundance. Targ. Is. I, 9.
- 3. preference, advance. Targ. Koh. II, 13; a. e.
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 3 distinct written forms H4195 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/מוֹתַ֨ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 3:19 | 1 |
| לְ/מוֹתָ֑ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 21:5 | 1 |
| מוֹתָ֑ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 14:23 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4195, 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
- יותר yôwthêr H3148 advantage
- יתור yâthûwr H3491 to remain
- יתר yether H3499 remainder
- יתרון yithrôwn H3504 profit
- יתרת yôthereth H3508 appendage
- מיתר mêythâr H4340 cord
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 → Showing 4 of 11 — not the complete family. 3 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 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
