מַשָּׁא
usury
‘usury’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4855 appears — 3 distinct verses 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.
Nehemiah 3 verses
- Nehemiah 5:7 מַשָּׁ֥א n c ms Then I consulted with myself, and contended with the nobles and the rulers, and said to them, You exact usury, everyone of his brother. I held a great assembly against them.
- Nehemiah 5:10 הַ/מַּשָּׁ֥א ptcl def.art + n c ms I likewise, my brothers and my servants, do lend them money and grain. Please let us leave off this usury.
- Nehemiah 10:31 וּ/מַשָּׁ֥א conj + n c ms cs and if the peoples of the land bring wares or any grain on the Sabbath day to sell, that we would not buy of them on the Sabbath, or on a holy day; and that we would forego the seventh year, and the exaction of every debt.
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.
The Hebrew noun משא centers on the idea of “usury.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Nehemiah (100%). First canonically at Nehemiah 5:7, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4855 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Nehemiah 3 verses 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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 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: Usury 2×
- American Standard Version: Let us leave off this usury 1×, Ye exact usury 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Usury 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Interest 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4855 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4855 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4855 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4855 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- lending on interest, usury
- in Neh 5:11 , the rate of " usury" was only one per cent
Word origin
n.m. Ne 5:10 lending on interest, or usury;—Ne 5:7 (as acc. cogn.), v 10 10:32.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נשה (nâshâh) (H5383) — to lend.
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 3 distinct written forms H4855 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/מַּשָּׁ֥א | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nehemiah 5:10 | 1 |
| וּ/מַשָּׁ֥א | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Nehemiah 10:31 | 1 |
| מַשָּׁ֥א | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nehemiah 5:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4855, 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
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 6 — 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.
