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אָבִיר

mighty

‘mighty’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H46 Strong's Hebrew
ʼâbîyr Transliteration
/aw-beer'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 6 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

At its core, אביר (ʼâbîyr) means “mighty.” Its uses cluster heavily in Isaiah (50% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 3 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Genesis 49:24. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
mighty
Modern gloss
mighty
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H46 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 →

6
distinct verses
The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
3 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
Genesis 49:24
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Genesis 49:24.
Isaiah 60:16
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Isaiah 60:16.
#3,040
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 17%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 2 · 33%
  • Prophets 3 · 50%

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 6 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 50%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 33%
  • Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 17%

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: Mighty 3×, Mighty one 3×
  • American Standard Version: Mighty 3×, Mighty one 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Mighty 4×, Mighty one 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mighty one of 3×, Mighty one 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H46 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mighty” 3×
  • “Mighty one” 3×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H46 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mighty” 3×
  • “Mighty one” 3×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H46 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mighty” 4×
  • “Mighty one” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H46 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Mighty one of” 3×
  • “Mighty one” 2×

Plus 2 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 2 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.

  1. strong, mighty - used only to describe God
  2. the Strong - old name for God (poetic)

Word origin

adj. strong; alw.= subst. the Strong, old name for God (poet.); only cstr. in אֲבִיר יַעֲקֹב Gn 49:24 & thence ψ 132:2, 5 Is 49:26; 60:16; א׳ יִשְׂרָאֵל Is 1:24 (cf. Che crit. n.)—BaNB 51 assigns this cstr. to אַבִּיר.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from אבר (ʼâbar) (H82) — to fly.

Part of speech: Adjective Masculine TWOT: 13c


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.

אַבִּיר

  • strong, mighty, eminent (opp. קל light, of no influence); noble. — Pl. אַבִּירִים. R. Hash. 25ᵇ אביר שבא׳ the noblest of the nobility. Y. ib. II, 58ᵇ bot. אַבִּירֵי עולם (Babli ib. l. c. חֲמוּרֵי; Koh. R. to I, 4 גדולי) the world’s noblest sons. [Esth. R. to II, 4, v. אַבִּירָם.]

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 H46 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
אֲבִ֥יר Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct Isaiah 49:26 2
לַ/אֲבִ֥יר Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct Psalms 132:2 2
אֲבִ֖יר Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct Isaiah 1:24 1
אֲבִ֣יר Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Construct Genesis 49:24 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H46, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → 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 6 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.