נָמֵר
leopard
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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5246 appears — 6 distinct verses across 5 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.
Song of Solomon 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 5:6 נָמֵ֤ר n c ms Therefore a lion out of the forest shall kill them, a wolf of the evenings shall destroy them, a leopard shall watch against their cities; everyone who goes out there shall be torn in pieces; because their transgressions are many, [and] their backsliding is increased.
- Jeremiah 13:23 וְ/נָמֵ֖ר conj + n c ms Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil.
Hosea 1 verse
Habakkuk 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.
The Hebrew noun נמר centers on the idea of “leopard.” Debuting at Song of Solomon 4:8, it then recurs through the corpus. It appears 6 verses across 5 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (33%), then Song of Solomon and Isaiah. It shares a root with נמרה, נמר and נמרים. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5246 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 2 verses 33%
- Song of Solomon 1 verse 17%
- Isaiah 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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: Leopard 3×
- American Standard Version: Leopard 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Leopard 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Leopard 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5246 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H5246 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5246 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5246 across 6 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 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.
- leopard
Word origin
n.m. Is 11:6 leopard;—abs. נ׳ Ho 13:7 + 3 times; pl. נְמֵרִים Hb 1:8; Ct 4:8;—leopard, as spotted Je 13:23, swift Hb 1:8, keen-eyed Je 5:6 (symb. of calamities of Isr.), so Ho 13:7 (sim. of י׳); נ׳ עִם־גְּדִי יִרְבָּ֑ץ Is 11:6 (predict.); הַרֲרֵי נְמֵרִים Ct 4:8 (‖ מְעֹנוֹת אֲרָיוֹת).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נמרה (Nimrâh) (H5247) — Nimrah.
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.
נָמֵר
- (b. h.) tiger or leopard. Y. Yeb. VIII, 9ᶜ top, v. חוּשׁ II. Snh. I, 4; B. Kam. I, 4, v. בַּרְדְּלִיס; a. e.—Pl. נְמֵרִים. Gen. R. s. 34. Midr. Till. to Ps. LXXVIII, 45; a. e.—[From Sabb. 107ᵇ, ref. to Jer. XIII, 23, it would appear that נמר, in Talmudic days, meant leopard.] e.g. Jeremiah 13:23
נָמַר
- , Pi. נִמֵּר (denom. of preced.) to give a checkered or striped appearance, esp. נ׳ שדה to take out or cut the ripe plants of a field, leaving the unripe stand for later crops. Peah III, 2. Men. 71ᵇ במְנַמֵּר לקליות when he cuts portions of the grain field with the intention of using the ears for roasting; במנמר לאוצר when he cuts for storage.—Part. pass. מְנוּמָּר striped, speckled. B. Kam. 119ᵇ לוקחין מהן בגד מנ׳ you may buy from them (weavers) (even) a checkered web (for which they may have used remnants of other people’s wool). Gitt. 54ᵇ משום דמיחזי כמנ׳ because (if he were to pass his pen over all the Divine Names in the scroll) the writing would look speckled; Men. 29ᵇ bot. משום דמיחזי כמ׳ it would look speckled (if he were to insert omitted vowel letters). Y. Succ. III, 53ᵈ bot.; Y. Maasr. I, 49ᵃ המ׳ a speckled Ethrog.
נְמַר
- Targ. Jer. V, 6; a. e.—Y. Peah III, 17ᶜ top (expl. המנמר ib. III, 2) כהדין נימרה making the field look checkered like a tiger (or leopard), v. נִמְרִירָה.—Pl. נִמְרִין, נִמְרַיָּא, נִי׳. Targ. Cant. IV, 8 (ed. Vien. נְמֵרִין). Targ. Hab. I, 8.—[בית נמרי, בית נמרא, נמרין, v. next w.] e.g. Habakkuk 1:8
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 5 distinct written forms H5246 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/נָמֵ֖ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 11:6 | 2 |
| כְּ/נָמֵ֖ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 13:7 | 1 |
| מִ/נְּמֵרִ֜ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Habakkuk 1:8 | 1 |
| נְמֵרִֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 4:8 | 1 |
| נָמֵ֤ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 5:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5246, 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
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 → 2 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
