נֵרְדְּ
spikenard
‘spikenard’ 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
- 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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (33%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (33%)
- 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 H5373 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.
Song of Solomon 3 verses
- Song of Solomon 1:12 נִרְדִּ֖/י n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs While the king sat at his table, My perfume spread its fragrance.
- Song of Solomon 4:13 נְרָדִֽים n c mp Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with precious fruits: Henna with spikenard plants,
- Song of Solomon 4:14 נֵ֣רְדְּ n c ms Spikenard and saffron, Calamus and cinnamon, with every kind of incense tree; Myrrh and aloes, with all the best spices,
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.
“spikenard” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun נרד (nêrd). With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Song of Solomon, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. First canonically at Song of Solomon 1:12, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5373 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
- Song of Solomon 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: Spikenard 3×
- American Standard Version: Spikenard 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Nard 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Nard 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5373 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5373 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5373 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 H5373 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- spikenard, nard
- an odoriferous aromatic plant from India
Word origin
n.m. nard, an odorif. plant from India (via Presia) (Skr. naladâ; Pers. nârdîn; Sab. Arabic transp. رَنْد according to DHMBurgen u. Schlosser 975 (SB xcvii) v. also Sab.Denkm. 82; Gk. νάρδος [so 𝔊] (through Semites) LewyFremdwörter 40; cf. LöwNo. 316 LagM. ii. 25);—abs. נ׳ Ct 4:14; sf. נִרְדִּי נָתַן רֵיחוֹ 1:12; pl. נְרָדִים 4:13.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign origin
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.
נֵרְדְּ
- (b. h.) Nard, an aromatic herb, Valerian. Ker. 6ᵃ; Y. Yoma IV, 41ᵈ, v. שִׁיבּוֹלֶת.—B. Mets. 86ᵃ bot. ככרין דנ׳ וכ׳ talents’ worth of N. [Cant. R. to I, 12 נרדי, expl. by R. M. סיריי my ill odor, v. next w.]
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 H5373 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נְרָדִֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 4:13 | 1 |
| נִרְדִּ֖/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Song of Solomon 1:12 | 1 |
| נֵ֣רְדְּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Song of Solomon 4:14 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
