סְאָה
seah
‘seah’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Dual
- Exactly two — for natural pairs and some measures of time.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5429 appears in the Book of Genesis — 1 distinct verse. 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
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.
סאה (çᵉʼâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “seah.” It clusters heavily in 2 Kings, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. With 6 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at Genesis 18:6, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. 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 H5429 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
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%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Two measures 4×, Measure 2×, Measures 2×
- American Standard Version: Two measures 4×, Measure 2×, Measures 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Two seahs 4×, Seah 3×, Seahs 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Seah of 3×, Two seahs of 3×, Seahs of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5429 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5429 across 9 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 H5429 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5429 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 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.
- seah, a measure of flour or grain
- probably equal to 1/3 ephah
Word origin
n.f. (v. infr.) se’āh, a measure of flour, grain, etc. (√ unknown; perhaps foreign word; NH id.; Aramaic סְאָה, סָאתָא, ܣܳܐܴܐ, ܣܶܐܴܐ, ܣܰܐܬܳܐ (Gk. σάτον, LewyFremdwörter 116 f.));—abs. סְאָה־ 2 K 7:1, 16, וּסֳאָה־ v 18 (Baer Ginsb cf. Ges§ 10 h); du. סָאתַיִם 1 K 18:32 + 3 times; pl. סְאִים Gn 18:6; 1 S 25:18;—always c. appos. of thing measured, Gn 18:6 (J), 1 S 25:18 1 K 18:32; 2 K 7:1(×2), 16(×2), 18(×2) (where appar. masc., perhaps after anal. of other measures of capacity, הִין, חֹמֶר, כֹּר, etc., AlbrechtZAW xvi (1896), 95);—סַאסְּאָה Is 27:8 v. סאסא.—On size of seʾāh = 1/3 ephah, = 12.148 litres (= 10.696 qts.), v. NowArch. i. 203 BenzArch. 183.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to define
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.
סְאָה
- (b. h.) S’ah, a measure of volume for dry objects and for liquids; in gen. measure. Men. XII, 4 בארבעים ס׳ וכ׳ in a reservoir containing forty S. he can bathe for purification, in forty less one drop &c. Mikv. I, 7; a. fr.—Sot. 9ᵃ אין … עד שתתמלא סְאָתוֹ the Lord does not exact payment (punishment) of a man until his measure is full. Ib. 8ᵇ; Tosef. ib. III, 1 (ref. to בסאסאה, Is. XXVII, 8) אין לי אלא שמדד בס׳ וכ׳ this would prove only that the Lord measures by the S’ah (repays only great sins, overlooking the small ones) &c.; Y. ib. I, 17ᵃ.—בֵּית ס׳ (or sub. בית) a field requiring one S’ah of seed, (a square measure) Beth S’ah. Shebi. III, 2. B. Bath. VII, 2 רובע לס׳ one fourth of a Kab for each (Beth) S’ah; a. fr.—Tanḥ. Ki Thissa26 משקל ארבעים ס׳ forty S’ah in weight (weight of forty S’ah of wheat).—Pl. סָאוֹת, סְאִים, סְאִין. Y. l. c. (ref. to סאון, Is. IX, 4) ריבה כאן ס׳ הרבה the text intimates here a variety of measures (recompenses). Men. VII, 1 חמש ס׳ וכ׳ five Jerusalem S’ah which are equal to six Desert S’ah. Ib. 77ᵃ; a. fr.—Du. סָאתַיִם. Ter. X, 8. Shebi. III, 4; a. fr. e.g. Isaiah 27:8
סְאָה ²
- Targ. II Kings VII, 1; 16; a. e.—Pl. סְאִין, סָאוִוין, סָאוִין, סָאוֵי, סָאוָון, סָוָון, סָוָן. Targ. Gen. XVIII, 6. Targ. Y. Ex. XXIX, 4; a. fr.—Targ. Y. Deut. XXXIV, 12 (a weight, v. preced.).—Pes. 113ᵃ סָאוֵי Ms. M. (ed. סְאָה). M. Kat. 12ᵃ בר שית ס׳ וכ׳ a vessel containing six S’ah (of beer) but well closed, is better &c.; a. e.—Du. סָאתָן. Targ. II Kings l. c.—V. סָאתָא.
סָאִין
- , v. סְיָן. [סְאִין pl. of סְאָה.]
סָאתָא I
- , S’ah; measure. Targ. Is. XXVII, 8. Targ. Job XX, 22; a. e.—Y. Ter. X, 47ᵇ top כמה ס׳ עבדא וכ׳ how much does a S’ah contain? Twenty four Log. Lev. R. s. 36; Y. Snh. X, 27ᵈ כאינש … והא ס׳ וכ׳ as if one says, here is the bag, here is the Sela, and here is the measure, rise and measure (said of one who asks immediate reward for a good deed); Ruth R. introd. (some ed. סאה); a. e.—Pl., v. סְאָה ch.
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 7 distinct written forms H5429 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/סָאתַ֧יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 2 Kings 7:1 | 2 |
| סְאִים֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 18:6 | 2 |
| וּֽ/סְאָה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 7:18 | 1 |
| סְאָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 7:1 | 1 |
| סְאָה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 7:16 | 1 |
| סָאתַ֣יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Kings 18:32 | 1 |
| סָאתַ֨יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 2 Kings 7:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5429, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → 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.
