מַעֲבָר
ford
also: pass, passing 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
6 distinct verses where H4569 appears in the Construct state, across 4 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
Judges 3 verses
- Judges 3:28 מַעְבְּר֤וֹת n c fp cs He said to them, Follow after me; for Yahweh has delivered your enemies the Moabites into your hand. They went down after him, and took the fords of the Jordan against the Moabites, and didn't allow a man to pass over.
- Judges 12:5 מַעְבְּר֥וֹת n c fp cs The Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. It was so, that when [any of] the fugitives of Ephraim said, Let me go over, the men of Gilead said to him, Are you an Ephraimite? If he said, No;
- Judges 12:6 מַעְבְּר֣וֹת n c fp cs then said they to him, Say now Shibboleth; and he said Sibboleth; for he couldn't manage to pronounce it right: then they laid hold on him, and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. There fell at that time of Ephraim forty-two thousand.
1 Samuel 1 verse
Isaiah 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.
“ford” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מעבר (maʻăbâr). Not a single-sense word: its full sense range also takes in “pass” and “passing”. With 11 verses in 6 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Judges, which alone accounts for 27% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 32:22. See the sense tree, 11-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4569 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.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 10 verses · 91%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 9%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Passages 3×, Fords 2×, Passage 2×
- American Standard Version†: Fords 2×, Pass 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Fords 6×, Ford 2×, Pass 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Fords of 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4569 across 11† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H4569 across 11† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H4569 across 11† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H4569 across 10† 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.
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 6 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.
מעבר I [m.] ford, pass, passing
- 1. מַעֲבַר יַבֹּק Gn 32:23 (J) the ford of (the) Jabbok. e.g. Genesis 32:23
- 2. pass, מַעֲבַר מִכְמָשׂ 1 S 13:23 the pass of M. e.g. 1 Samuel 13:23
- 3. passing, sweep, כָּל־מַעֲבַר מַטֶּה Is 30:32 every sweep of the rod (עָבַר 4 c). e.g. Isaiah 30:32
מעבר II ford, pass, passage
- 1. ford, only pl. Jos 2:7 (JE), Ju 3:28; 12:5, 6; Is 16:2; so also 1 S 13:7 (for MT עָֽבְרוּ) We Dr Kit Löhr; + מַעְבֶּרֶת 1 K 7:46 = 2 Ch 4:17, v. סֻכּוֹת. e.g. Joshua 2:7
- 2. pass (wady, ravine), 1 S 14:4; Is 10:29. e.g. 1 Samuel 14:4
- 3. passage in defensive works of Bab. Je 51:32. e.g. Jeremiah 51:32
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
II. n.[m.] ford, pass, passing;—only cstr.:
I. n.f. ford, pass, passage;—abs. מ׳ Is 10:29; pl. מַעְבָּרוֹת Is 16:2; Je 51:32, מַעְבְּרוֹת abs. Jos 2:7; 1 S 14:4; cstr. Ju 3:28 + 2 times;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עבר (ʻâbar) (H5674) — to pass over.
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.
מַעְבָּר
- (עָבַר) pitchfork for the first stage of winnowing (passing the grain from one side to the other). Kel. XIII, 7; T’bul Yom IV, 6. [Ar. reads מעדר, with Var. lect. מעבר, מעפר.]
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 11 distinct written forms H4569 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַֽ/מַּעְבְּר֑וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Joshua 2:7 | 1 |
| הַֽ/מַּעְבְּר֗וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 14:4 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/מַּעְבָּר֣וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 51:32 | 1 |
| מַֽעֲבַר֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 30:32 | 1 |
| מַעְבְּר֣וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Judges 12:6 | 1 |
| מַעְבְּר֤וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Judges 3:28 | 1 |
| מַעְבְּר֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Judges 12:5 | 1 |
| מַעְבָּרָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 10:29 | 1 |
| מַעְבָּרֹ֖ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 16:2 | 1 |
| מַעֲבַ֖ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 13:23 | 1 |
| מַעֲבַ֥ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Genesis 32:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4569, 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 → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 11 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.
