מָסָה
to melt
also: dissolve, be liquefied fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (25%)
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 H4529 appears — 4 distinct verses across 2 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.
Joshua 1 verse
Psalms 3 verses
- Psalms 6:6 אַמְסֶֽה Hiphil impf 1cs I am weary with my groaning; Every night I flood my bed; I drench my couch with my tears.
- Psalms 39:11 וַ/תֶּ֣מֶס conj + Hiphil wimpf 2ms When you rebuke and correct man for iniquity, You consume his wealth like a moth. Surely every man is but a breath." Selah.
- Psalms 147:18 וְ/יַמְסֵ֑/ם conj + Hiphil impf 3ms + sfx pers 3mp He sends out his word, and melts them. He causes his wind to blow, and the waters flow.
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.
מסה (mâçâh) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to melt.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. Psalms dominates its distribution — 3 of 4 verses. It first appears in Joshua 14:8. Ranging over 3 senses, its meaning includes “dissolve” and “be liquefied”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4529 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Consume away 1×, I water 1×, Melt 1×
- American Standard Version: Consume away 1×, I water 1×, Melt 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Consuming 1×, Drench 1×, Melt with fear 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He makes them melt 1×, I melt 1×, Made 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4529 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4529 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4529 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4529 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 3 senses 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.
- to melt, dissolve, be liquefied
(Hiphil)
- to melt, cause to dissolve, consume, cause to vanish
- to intimidate (figuratively)
Word origin
[ מָסָה ] vb. melt, dissolve, be liquified;—only Hiph.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
מָסָה
- , v. מסי
מַסָּה
- trial; wonder.—Pl. מַסּוֹת. Pesik. R. s. 33. Deut. R. s. 7, v. מָסָה.
מסי
- (b. h.) to melt, flow; to cause running off, effect curdling. Midr. Till. to Ps. LXXVIII, 25 שלא יִמְסֶה that the manna might not melt.—Denom. מְסוֹ.
- to cause to flow. Midr. Till. to Ps. VI, 7 התחיל בוכה ומַמְסֶה מטתו וכ׳ ed. Bub. (ed. וממחה) he began to weep and make his bed flow with (his) tears; Yalk. Ps. 636.
- same, to dissolve, weaken. Deut. R. s. 7 (play on מַסּוֹת, Deut. XXIX, 2) המכות מְמַסּוֹת גופיהן וכ׳ the plagues weakened the bodies of the Egyptians; Yalk. ib. 940. e.g. Deuteronomy 29:2
- to be melted, to fall away. Tosef. Sot. III, 4 ירכה נִמְסֵית her thigh will fall away.
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 H4529 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אַמְסֶֽה | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Psalms 6:6 | 1 |
| הִמְסִ֖יו | Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Joshua 14:8 | 1 |
| וְ/יַמְסֵ֑/ם | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 147:18 | 1 |
| וַ/תֶּ֣מֶס | Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 39:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4529, 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 3 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.
