מִצְפֶּה
watchtower
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
- 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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4707 appears — 2 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.
2 Chronicles 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.
“watchtower” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מצפה (mitspeh). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. More than half of its appearances fall in 2 Chronicles. First canonically at 2 Chronicles 20:24, it enters the text early. Related forms include צפה, צפה and צפיה. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4707 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 50%
- Isaiah 1 verse 50%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Toward the watch tower 1×, Watchtower 1×
- American Standard Version: Watch-tower 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Place overlooking 1×, Watchtower 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Watchtower 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4707 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4707 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4707 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4707 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 5 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.
- 1. watch-tower, Is 21:8. e.g. Isaiah 21:8
- 2. outlook-point, 2 Ch 20:24 on high ground. e.g. 2 Chronicles 20:24
- 1. הַמּ׳ in Shephelah of Judah Jos 15:38, Μασ(σ)ηφα. e.g. Joshua 15:38
- 2. מִצְפֵּה־מוֹאָב 1 S 22:3, Μασσηφα. e.g. 1 Samuel 22:3
- 3. מִצְפֵּה גִלְעָד Ju 11:29(×2) (ἡ σκοπιά) prob. = רָמַת הַמּ׳ Jos 13:26 Μασ(ση)φα and perhaps מִצְפָּה 2.—Jos 11:8; 18:26 v. מִצְפָּה 3, 4. e.g. Judges 11:29
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
Derived from צפה (tsâphâh) (H6822) — to keep watch.
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.
מִצְפֶּה
- (b. h.) pr. n. pl. Mizpeh or Mizpah (Watch-Tower). Peah II, 6 איש המ׳ the man of M. (or the governor of the Watch-Tower of the Temple).
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 2 distinct written forms H4707 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/מִּצְפֶּ֖ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 20:24 | 1 |
| מִצְפֶּ֣ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 21:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4707, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- צפו Tsᵉphôw H6825 Zepho
- צפיון Tsiphyôwn H6837 Ziphion
- צפים Tsôphîym H6839 Zophim
- צפת Tsᵉphath H6857 Zephath
- מצפה Mitspeh H4708 Mizpeh
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 10 — not the complete family. 5 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
