מֵסַב
surroundings
also: round thing, round about, that which surrounds fuller range ↓
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.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
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
- Both
- Attested as both masculine and feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Construct 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4524 appears — 5 distinct verses across 5 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.
1 Kings 1 verse
2 Kings 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Song of Solomon 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.
מסב — transliterated mêçab — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “surroundings.” It is rare — just 5 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It first appears in 1 Kings 6:29. It also covers “round thing”, “round about”, and “that which surrounds”, alongside “surroundings” — see its full sense range. Related forms include סבב, מוסב and נסבה. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4524 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 60%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 40%
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: Round about 2×
- American Standard Version: Round about 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Around 1×, Places all around 1×, Surround me 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Around 1×, Environs of 1×, Ones surrounding me 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4524 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4524 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4524 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4524 across 5 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 3 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.
- a. pl. surrounding places, מְסִבֵּי יְרוּשׁ׳ 2 K 23:5 places round about Jerus. e.g. 2 Kings 23:5
- b. as adv. מֵסַב round about 1 K 6:29; fpl. מְסִבּוֹת on all sides, in all directions, Jb 37:12 (of cloud Di < of lightning Bu Du). e.g. 1 Kings 6:29
- 2. sf. מְסִבּוֹ Ct 1:12 dub.: round table Ew De; cushion, divan BaeKau; cf. on all these Bu.—מְסִבָּ֑י ψ 140:10 v. סבב Hiph. e.g. Song of Solomon 1:12
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.] that which surrounds, or is round;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from סבב (çâbab) (H5437) — to turn around.
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.
מִיסַּב
- (נְסַב) taking, lifting up.—מ׳ אפין = h. משוא פנים, partiality. Targ. Y. Ex. XXIII, 3; a. e.—Targ. Y. I Gen. IV, 8 (not מתיב). Targ. Prov. XXVIII, 21 מ׳ באפי (read: אַפֵּי).—מ׳ וּמִיתַּן taking and giving, dealing. Targ. Is. IX, 4.
מִסַּב
- , v. מִיסַּב
מֵסֵב
- dining couch. Sabb. 63ᵃ top במ׳ רחב וכ׳ on a wide couch or on a narrow couch (an obscene disguise for a fat or a lean woman, v. גּוּרְדְּלִי).—Cant. R. to I, 12 במְסִבּוֹ ברקיע ‘on his couch’ (ib.), in heaven.
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 H4524 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּ/מְסִבּ֔/וֹ | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Construct | Song of Solomon 1:12 | 1 |
| וּ/מְסִבֵּ֖י | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Construct | 2 Kings 23:5 | 1 |
| מְסִבּ֨וֹת | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute | Job 37:12 | 1 |
| מְסִבָּ֑/י | Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 140:9 | 1 |
| מֵסַ֣ב | Noun, Common, Both, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 6:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4524, 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
- מוסב mûwçâb H4141 surrounding
- נסבה nᵉçibbâh H5252 turn of affairs
- סבה çibbâh H5438 turn of events
- סביב çâbîyb H5439 round about
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
