מִקְרֶה
chance
also: accident, happening, fortune fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
1 verse where H4745 appears in the Construct state in the Book of Ecclesiastes. 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.
Ecclesiastes
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.
“chance” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מקרה (miqreh). It clusters heavily in Ecclesiastes, which alone accounts for 63% of its uses. With 8 verses in 3 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Ruth 2:3. Not a single-sense word: its full sense range also takes in “accident”, “happening”, and “fortune”. See the sense tree, 8-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4745 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,342
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,342 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ecclesiastes 5 verses 63%
- 1 Samuel 2 verses 25%
- Ruth 1 verse 13%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 25%
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: Befalleth 3×, Event 3×
- American Standard Version: Befalleth 3×, Event 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fate 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Happening 4×, Happening of 3×, Chance 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4745 across 10 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 H4745 across 10 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 H4745 across 8 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4745 across 13 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.
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 2 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. accident, chance, 1 S 6:9; 20:26; c. קָרָה Ru 2:3 (v. ק׳ 1). e.g. 1 Samuel 6:9
- 2. in Ec, fortune, fate, מ׳ אֶחָד יִקְרֶה אֶת־כֻּלָּם Ec 2:14 cf. v 15, 3:19(×3); 9:2, 3. e.g. Ecclesiastes 2:14
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
n.m. 1 S 6:9 accident, chance, fortune;—abs. מ׳ 1 S 6:9 +; cstr. מִקְרֵה Ec 2:15 (so read also 3:19(×2) with 𝔊 RuëtKau Wild, for MT מִקְרֶה);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קרה (qârâh) (H7136) — to meet.
Forms in the corpus
The 8 distinct written forms H4745 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מִקְרֶ֥ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 9:3 | 2 |
| מִקְרֶ֨ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 3:19 | 2 |
| וּ/מִקְרֶ֣ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 3:19 | 1 |
| וּ/מִקְרֶ֤ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 3:19 | 1 |
| כְּ/מִקְרֵ֤ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 2:15 | 1 |
| מִקְרֶ֔/הָ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ruth 2:3 | 1 |
| מִקְרֶ֣ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 20:26 | 1 |
| שֶׁ/מִּקְרֶ֥ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 2:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4745, 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
- מקרה mᵉqâreh H4746 beam work
- קרה qâreh H7137 chance
- קרי qᵉrîy H7147 opposition
- קריה qiryâh H7151 city
- קרת qereth H7176 city
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
