מֶ֫כֶס
tax
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.
3 distinct verses where H4371 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.
Numbers 3 verses
- Numbers 31:28 מֶ֜כֶס n c ms Levy a tribute to Yahweh of the men of war who went out to battle: one soul of five hundred, [both] of the persons, and of the oxen, and of the donkeys, and of the flocks:
- Numbers 31:37 הַ/מֶּ֥כֶס ptcl def.art + n c ms and Yahweh's tribute of the sheep was six hundred seventy-five.
- Numbers 31:41 מֶ֨כֶס֙ n c ms Moses gave the tribute, which was Yahweh's heave-offering, to Eleazar the priest, as Yahweh commanded Moses.
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 מכס centers on the idea of “tax.” The word gravitates to Numbers (100%). It appears 6 verses across 1 book of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Its earliest occurrence is Numbers 31:28. Older and newer Bibles part ways — “tribute” in the King James Version, “tax” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4371 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Numbers 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 6 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: Tribute 6×
- American Standard Version: 's tribute 4×, Tribute 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Including a tribute 3×, Tribute 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tax 5×, Was 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4371 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4371 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4371 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4371 across 9 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.
- computation, proportion to be paid, tribute, tax
Word origin
n.m. computation, proportion to be paid, tax (Palm. מכסא ReckendorfZMG 1885, 379 ff.; NH מֶכֶס, Aramaic מִכְסָא, ܡܰܟܣܳܐ tax (hence Arabic مَكْسٌ as loan-word Frä283); Assyrian miksu, DlHWB 407 (√ מכס); NH מוֹכֵס tax-collector; so Assyrian makkasu, cf. Arabic مَكَّاسٌ )—Nu 31:28 וַהֲרֵמֹתָ֫ מ׳ לי׳ and thou shalt separate a tax (duty levied on the spoil) for י׳, v 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 (all P).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: probably from an unused root meaning to enumerate
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.
מָכַס
- (denom. of next w.) to pay toll on. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXVIII, 20 אם אינך מוֹכֵס כל וכ׳ unless thou payest the toll on all thy goods, thou wilt have nothing left.—V. מוֹכֵס.
מֶכֶס
- [marking off, counting,) toll, tax. Succ. 30ᵃ בית המ׳ the custom-house. Sabb. 33ᵇ; Ab. Zar. 2ᵇ תקנתם גשרים ליטול בהם מ׳ you put up bridges in order to raise toll on them. Ib. 13ᵃ יניח לו את המ׳ to him shall the toll be remitted. Tanḥ. Lekh 5 טלו מ׳ של חטין collect the duty as if it were wheat; a. fr.—Pl. מִכְסָאוֹת. Ab. d’R. N. ch. XXVIII.
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 H4371 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/מִכְסָ֥/ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 31:38 | 2 |
| הַ/מֶּ֥כֶס | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:37 | 1 |
| וּ/מִכְסָ/ם֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 31:40 | 1 |
| מֶ֜כֶס | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:28 | 1 |
| מֶ֨כֶס֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:41 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4371, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → 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 6 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.
