מֶ֫כֶר
price
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 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 H4377 appears — 3 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.
Numbers 1 verse
Nehemiah 1 verse
Proverbs 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.
מכר (meker) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “price.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Numbers, which alone accounts for 33% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Numbers 20:19. It clusters with מכר, ממכר and מכיר under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4377 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 →
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) 2 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
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: All manner of ware 1×, Price 1×
- American Standard Version: All manner of wares 1×, Price 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: It 1×, Merchandise 1×, More precious 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Merchandise 1×, Price 1×, Value 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4377 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4377 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4377 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4377 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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. merchandise Ne 13:16; e.g. Nehemiah 13:16
- 2. value, price, of water Nu 20:19 (JE), cf. Dt 18:8 (v. supr.); of capable woman Pr 31:10. e.g. Numbers 20:19
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 31:10 merchandise, value;—מ׳ abs. Ne 13:16; מִכְרָהּ Pr 31:10; מִכְרָם Nu 20:19; prob. also מִמְכָּרָיו (read מִמְּכָרָיו) Dt 18:8, v. Di Dr;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מכר (mâkar) (H4376) — to sell.
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.
מָכַר
- to sell. Sifré Deut. 169 (ref. to Deut. XVIII, 8) מה מָכְרוּ וכ׳ what have the fathers sold to one another? (Answ. the weekly turns); Succ. 56ᵃ; Y. ib. V, end, 55ᵈ. B. Bath. 64ᵇ, a. fr. מוֹכֵר בעין יפה מוכר the seller is presumed to sell liberally, i.e. to sell all except that which is specified as excluded; מ׳ בעיין רעה מ׳ he sells only that which is specified as sold. Ib. IV, 1 …המוכר … לא מ׳ וכ׳ if one sells …, he has not implicitly sold &c. Sot. III, 8 אין האשה מוֹכֶרֶת וכ׳ a woman cannot sell her daughter; a. v. fr.—Part. pass. מָכוּר; f. מְכוּרָה; pl. מְכוּרִים מְכוּרִין; מְכוּרוֹת. Tosef. Ab. Zar. III (IV), 18 הרי זה מ׳ he is sold (the sale is valid). B. Bath. IV, 3. Tosef. B. Kam. VII, 8 חביות המ׳ וכ׳ wine casks which have been sold to the shopkeeper (awaiting delivery); a. v. fr. e.g. Deuteronomy 18:8
- to be sold. Sot. l. c. האיש נ׳ … נִמְכֶּרֶת a man can be sold for his theft, but a woman cannot &c. Mekh. Mishp. s. 2; a. fr.
*מְכַר
- , Ithpa. אִתְמַכַּר (denom. of מַכָּר) to be made acquainted. Targ. Prov. XIX, 14 Var. ed. Lag. (ed. מתמסרא, v. מְסַר).
מֶכֶר
- sale. Kidd. 6ᵇ במ׳ לא קנה if the transaction is a sale (of land), he has not acquired possession (by delivering the purchasing money as a loan). Ib. 47ᵃ ושוין במ׳ and they agree in the case of a sale. Keth. XI, 4 מִכְרָהּ בטל her sale is invalid; a. fr.—V. מִמְכָּר.
מַכָּר
- acquaintance, friend. Y. Gitt. III, 45ᵃ ויש מ׳ לעני has the poor man a friend?, i.e., is he who separates the poor man’s tithes permitted to reserve them for a certain person?—Pl. מַכָּרִים, constr. מַכָּרֵי. Ib. במ׳ כהונה וכ׳ the Mishnah speaks of friends of priests or Levites (to whom the owner is in the habit of giving the priestly shares); Bab. Gitt. 30ᵃ. Ib. במ׳ לא קתני (sub. כהונה) the Mishnah does not distinctly speak of friends. Ḥull. 133ᵃ; a. fr.
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 H4377 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מִכְרָ֑/ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 20:19 | 1 |
| מִכְרָֽ/הּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 31:10 | 1 |
| מֶ֑כֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nehemiah 13:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4377, 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
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 5 — not the complete family. 2 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.
