מַחְתֶּ֫רֶת
burglary
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4290 appears in the Book of Jeremiah — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Jeremiah
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.
At its core, מחתרת (machtereth) means “burglary.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Exodus (50%), then Jeremiah. Scripture first uses it in Exodus 22:2. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4290 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Breaking up 1×, Secret search 1×
- American Standard Version: Breaking in 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Breaking in 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Breaking in 1×, Burglary 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4290 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4290 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4290 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4290 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a breaking in, burglary
Word origin
מַחְתֶּ֫רֶת n.m. breaking in, burglary
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חתר (châthar) (H2864) — to dig.
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.
מַחְתֶּרֶת
- breaking in, breach. Snh. VIII, 6 הבא במ׳ נידון וכ׳ he who breaks in is judged (allowed to be killed with impunity) on account of what he will do. Ib. 72ᵃ; Yoma 85ᵇ מאי טעמא דמ׳ what is the reason of the law allowing to kill one breaking in (Ex. XXII, 1)?—Snh. 72ᵇ אין לי אלא מ׳ גגו וכ׳ the text speaks only of breaking in, whence can it be proven that the thief found on one’s roof &c. may be killed?—Ib. מַחְתַּרְתּוֹ זו וכ׳ his breaking in serves the place of forewarning (he knew what he might expect). Ib. 103ᵃ (ref. to ויחתר, II Chr. XXXIII, 13, v. S. Baer, Liber Chron., p. 126, a. Rabb. D. S. to Snh. l. c. note 200) עשה לו הק"בה כמין מ׳ וכ׳ the Lord made for him an opening in the heaven to receive him &c.; (Pesik. Shub., p. 162ᵇ חֲתִירָה). Midr. Till. to Ps. CXVIII, מה מצא … מן המ׳ what has he found in our possession (taken) from the place we broke into? Ib. המ׳ זו העיר the place broken into is the City (of Jerusalem); a. e. e.g. Exodus 22:1
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 2 distinct written forms H4290 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַ/מַּחְתֶּ֥רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 2:34 | 1 |
| בַּ/מַּחְתֶּ֛רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 22:2 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
