מֹרָה
bitterness
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4786 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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
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.
“bitterness” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מרה (môrâh). It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Genesis. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Genesis 26:35. It shares a root with מרר, ממרר and מר. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4786 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 100%
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: Were a grief 1×
- American Standard Version: They were a grief 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Grief 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Grief of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4786 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4786 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4786 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4786 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- bitterness, grief
Word origin
Derived from מרר (mârar) (H4843) — to be bitter.
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.
מָרָה I
- (b. h.)
- 1. fem. of מַר II, bitter.
- 2. bitter taste. Y. Ber. VI, 10ᵃ בטלה מָרָתָן their bitter taste is gone.
- 3. drop, poison (v. אֶרֶס). Ter. VIII, 5 המ׳ the serpent’s discharge.—Esp. gall, bile. Ḥull. III, 1; a. fr.—B. Mets. 107ᵇ (ref. to Ex. XXIII, 25) זו מ׳ that means (overflow of) bile, v. חָלָה.—Trnsf. austerity, gravity. Cant. R. to IV, 4 (play on מֹרִיָּה) שממנו יוצאת מ׳ לעולם (not יוצא) from it austerity (responsibility) went forth to the world. Keth. 103ᵇ זרוק מ׳ בתלמידים cast bile among the students (be austere against them). Sifré Deut. 323 (ref. to Deut. XXXII, 32 אשכלת מררת) הגדולים שבכם מָרָתָן פרוסה בכם כאשכל as to the great among you, their bile (austere rebuke) is distributed among you as the juice in the grapes; Yalk. ib. 946 מרתן פרוסה בהן וכ׳ their bile is distributed within them. e.g. Exodus 23:25
מָרָה II
- (b. h.) pr. n. pl. Marah, a station in the desert (so named from its bitter waters). Snh. 56ᵇ; Hor. 8ᵇ; a. e.
מָרָה III
- hoe, v. מָרָא II.
מָרָה IV
- 1. to be fat;
- 2. to be disobedient, v. מרי I, II.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4786, 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
- ממרר mamrôr H4472 bitterness
- מר mar H4751 bitter
- מר mar H4752 drop
- מר môr H4753 myrrh
- מרירות mᵉrîyrûwth H4814 bitterness
- מרירי mᵉrîyrîy H4815 bitter
- מרר mᵉrôr H4844 bitter herb
- מררה mᵉrêrâh H4845 gall
- מררה mᵉrôrâh H4846 poison
- תמרור tamrûwr H8563 bitterness
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 14 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
