אָבִיר
mighty
‘mighty’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H46 appears in the Book of Genesis — 1 distinct verse. 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
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
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.
- #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 →
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 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:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H46 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H46 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H46 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- strong, mighty - used only to describe God
- 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.
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.
