מַשָּׂא
Massa
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Massa’ 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H4854 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.
Genesis 1 verse
1 Chronicles 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.
משא (Massâʼ) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Massa.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. Genesis dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 25:14. For the data behind this summary, explore 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4854 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
- Genesis 1 verse 50%
- 1 Chronicles 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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Massa 2×
- American Standard Version: Massa 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Massa 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Massa 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4854 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4854 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4854 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4854 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 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. ‘son’ of Ishmael
- 2. realm of king Lemuel
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
מַשָּׂא n.pr.gent. et terr.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from משא (massâʼ) (H4853) — burden.
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.
מְשָׁא
- , v. מְשֵׁי
מַשָּׂא
- m (b. h.;
- 1. carrying. Kel. I, 1 מטמאין במ׳ make the carrier unclean. Ib. 3 ששוה מַגָּעוֹ למַשָּׂאוֹ the touch of which has the same effect as the carrying of it; a. fr.
- 2. מ׳ ומַתָּן carrying and giving, business, dealings; worldly affairs; intercourse. Sabb. 120ᵃ במ׳ ומ׳ in worldly affairs, opp. בדברי תורה. Kidd. 35ᵃ איש דבר מ׳ ומ׳ a man (has the protection of the law) because he is engaged in business. Yoma 86ᵃ מַשָּׂאוֹ ומַתָּנוֹ וכ׳ his dealings with men; a. fr.—Kidd. 30ᵇ כל משאו ומתנו בך he (the tempter) will always be busy with thee.
- 3. burden. Tanḥ. B’midb. 2, v. מַשּׂוֹא.—Trnsf. burden of prophecy. Gen. R. s. 44 עשרה לשונות נקראת נבואה … מ׳ וכ׳ prophecy goes by ten names: ‘vision’ … ‘burden’ &c.; ib. רבנן אמרי מ׳ כמשמעו וכ׳ the Rabbis say, the severest of all is massa, as its name indicates (burden) &c.; Cant. R. to III, 4; a. e.—Pl. מַשָּׂאוֹת. Gitt. 71ᵃ מ׳ ומתנות business transactions.
מֵשָׁא
- , v. מֵישָׁא
משא
- , Pes. 111ᵇ כרו מ׳, v. כְּרוּמְשָׁא
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 H4854 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/מַשָּֽׂא | Noun, Proper | Genesis 25:14 | 1 |
| מַשָּׂ֖א | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 1:30 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Massa). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
A lifting up, gift, one of the sons of Ishmael, the founder of an Arabian tribe (Gen. 25:14); a nomad tribe inhabiting the Arabian desert toward Babylonia.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(burden), a son of Ishmael. (Genesis 26:14; 1 Chronicles 1:30) His descendants were not improbably the Masani, placed by Ptolemy in the east of Arabia, near the borders of Babylonia.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
a burden; prophecy
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
