מַסַּע
journey
also: a pulling up, breaking camp, setting out 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.
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
9 distinct verses where H4550 appears in the Construct state, across 3 books. 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Exodus 3 verses
- Exodus 17:1 לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp All the congregation of the children of Israel traveled from the wilderness of Sin, by their journeys, according to Yahweh's commandment, and encamped in Rephidim; but there was no water for the people to drink.
- Exodus 40:36 מַסְעֵי/הֶֽם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp When the cloud was taken up from over the tent, the children of Israel went onward, throughout all their journeys;
- Exodus 40:38 מַסְעֵי/הֶֽם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp For the cloud of Yahweh was on the tent by day, and there was fire in the cloud by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel, throughout all their journeys.
Numbers 5 verses
- Numbers 10:6 לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶֽם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp When you blow an alarm the second time, the camps that lie on the south side shall take their journey: they shall blow an alarm for their journeys.
- Numbers 10:12 לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp The children of Israel set forward according to their journeys out of the wilderness of Sinai; and the cloud abode in the wilderness of Paran.
- Numbers 10:28 מַסְעֵ֥י n c mp cs Thus were the travels of the children of Israel according to their hosts; and they set forward.
- Numbers 33:1 מַסְעֵ֣י n c mp cs These are the journeys of the children of Israel, when they went forth out of the land of Egypt by their hosts under the hand of Moses and Aaron.
- Numbers 33:2 לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp Moses wrote their goings out according to their journeys by the commandment of Yahweh: and these are their journeys according to their goings out.
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.
“journey” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מסע (maççaʻ). It clusters heavily in Numbers, which alone accounts for 55% of its uses. With 11 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at Genesis 13:3, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 4 senses — beyond “journey” it also covers “a pulling up”, “breaking camp”, and “setting out”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4550 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 →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 11 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 11 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 11 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: Journeys 3×
- American Standard Version: Journeys 3×, According to their journeys 2×, Throughout all their journeys 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Journey 2×, Journeys 2×, Set out 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Travels 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4550 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H4550 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H4550 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4550 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 4 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.
- a pulling up (of stakes), breaking camp, setting out, journey
- pulling up, breaking camp
- setting out
- station, stage, journey
Word origin
Derived from נסע (nâçaʻ) (H5265) — to journey.
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.
מַסָּע
- removal; journey; station. Cant. R. to III, 6 ממ׳ למ׳ from station to station; a. fr.—Pl. מַסָּעוֹת (fem.). Snh. 94ᵇ עשר מ׳ נסע וכ׳ that wicked man (Sennacherib) marched ten journeys in that one day; Yalk. Is. 284. Tanḥ. B’midb. 2 ובאה עמהן במ׳ and it (the well) went with them on their journeys; Num. R. s. 1. Tosef. R. Hash. III (II), 3 ובמ׳ and the signal for marching (Num. X, 2-8); a. fr.—Pesik. R. s. 16 המַסָּעִים the marches in the desert.—[Tosef. R. Hash. II (I), 2 מסעות, מסעיות, v. מַשּׂוּאָה.] e.g. Numbers 10:2
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 9 distinct written forms H4550 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 17:1 | 3 |
| מַסְעֵי/הֶֽם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 40:36 | 2 |
| וּ/לְ/מַסַּ֖ע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 10:2 | 1 |
| לְ/מַסְעֵי/הֶֽם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 10:6 | 1 |
| לְ/מַסַּ֖ע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 10:11 | 1 |
| לְ/מַסָּעָ֔י/ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 13:3 | 1 |
| מַסְעֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 33:1 | 1 |
| מַסְעֵ֥י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 10:28 | 1 |
| מַסְעֵי/הֶ֖ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 33:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4550, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 11 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.
