מְכַסֶּה
covering
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, Construct 2 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4374 appears — 4 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.
Leviticus 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 14:11 וּ/מְכַסֶּ֖י/ךָ conj + n c ms cs + sfx pers 2ms Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, [and] the noise of your viols: the worm is spread under you, and worms cover you.
- Isaiah 23:18 וְ/לִ/מְכַסֶּ֥ה conj + prep + n c ms Her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to Yahweh: it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be for those who dwell before Yahweh, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing.
Ezekiel 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.
“covering” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מכסה (mᵉkaççeh). With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Isaiah, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Leviticus 9:19. From the same root come כסה, כסא and כסא. See the sense tree, 4-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4374 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 75%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 25%
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: Clothing 1×, Cover 1×, Covereth 1×
- American Standard Version: Clothing 1×, Covereth 1×, Was thine awning 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Awning 1×, Blanket 1×, Clothing 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Clothing 1×, Covers 1×, For 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4374 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4374 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4374 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4374 across 6 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.
- covering, that which covers
Word origin
Derived from כסה (kâçâh) (H3680) — to cover.
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.
מִכְסֶה
- 1. tent-cover. Sabb. 28ᵃ; a. e.—Pl. מִכְסָאוֹת. Ib. Num. R. s. 12, end; a. e.
- 2. (v. Lev. III, 3) the cover of the inwards, peritoneum. Y. Hor. I, 46ᵃ top ושל מ׳ (not ולומ׳) and the fat of the peritoneum. e.g. Leviticus 3:3
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 4 distinct written forms H4374 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/הַֽ/מְכַסֶּה֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 9:19 | 1 |
| וְ/לִ/מְכַסֶּ֥ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 23:18 | 1 |
| וּ/מְכַסֶּ֖י/ךָ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 14:11 | 1 |
| מְכַסֵּֽ/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 27:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4374, 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
- כסא keçeʼ H3677 full moon
- כסא kiççêʼ H3678 throne
- כסוי kâçûwy H3681 covering
- כסות kᵉçûwth H3682 covering
- כסת keçeth H3704 band
- מכסה mikçeh H4372 covering
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
