סֹ֫הַר
roundhouse
also: house of roundness, prison fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
Every verse where H5470 appears — 6 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.
Genesis 6 verses
- Genesis 39:20 הַ/סֹּ֔הַר הַ/סֹּֽהַר ptcl def.art + n c ms ptcl def.art + n c ms Joseph's master took him, and put him into the prison, the place where the king's prisoners were bound, and he was there in custody.
- Genesis 39:21 הַ/סֹּֽהַר ptcl def.art + n c ms But Yahweh was with Joseph, and showed kindness to him, and gave him favor in the sight of the keeper of the prison.
- Genesis 39:22 הַ/סֹּ֨הַר֙ הַ/סֹּ֑הַר ptcl def.art + n c ms ptcl def.art + n c ms The keeper of the prison committed to Joseph's hand all the prisoners who were in the prison. Whatever they did there, he was the doer of it.
- Genesis 39:23 הַ/סֹּ֗הַר ptcl def.art + n c ms The keeper of the prison didn't look after anything that was under his hand, because Yahweh was with him; and that which he did, Yahweh made it prosper.
- Genesis 40:3 הַ/סֹּ֑הַר ptcl def.art + n c ms He put them in custody in the house of the captain of the guard, into the prison, the place where Joseph was bound.
- Genesis 40:5 הַ/סֹּֽהַר ptcl def.art + n c ms They both dreamed a dream, each man his dream, in one night, each man according to the interpretation of his dream, the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were bound in the prison.
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.
סהר (çôhar) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “roundhouse.” Genesis dominates its distribution — 6 of 6 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. It first appears in Genesis 39:20. Ranging over 2 senses, its meaning includes “house of roundness” and “prison”. 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 H5470 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 6 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: not separately translated
- Berean Standard Bible: Prison 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Round 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Does not render H5470 with a distinct English word (not separately translated in its 8 tagged occurrences).
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5470 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 7 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5470 across 8 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.
- house of roundness, roundhouse, prison
- name of a prison
Word origin
Derived from סהר (çahar) (H5469) — roundness.
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.
סַהַר
- c. (b. h.;
- 1. an enclosed place, esp. the enclosure for cattle near a dwelling; stable. Erub. II, 3 (18ᵃ; Mish. a. Ms. M. everywhere סַחַר). Ib. 22ᵃ; Y. ib. IV, 21ᵈ bot.; Tosef. ib. III (II), 9. Tosef. Sabb. X (XI), 1. Shebi. III, 4 עושה ס׳ וכ׳ may put up (in the field) an enclosure covering an area of &c.; Tosef. ib. II, 15. Ib. 16 שׂהר; a. fr.—Tanḥ. Ki Thissa 2 (play on הסהר, Cant. VII, 3) הס׳ שדומה לסוחר וכ׳ (the meeting place of the Sanhedrin is called) hassahar, because it resembles a merchant’s store. e.g. Song of Solomon 7:3
- 2. (cmp. next w.) moon. Ib. ed. Bub. 1 אגן הס׳ כחצי הירח ăgan hassahar means, ‘like a half-moon’ (the semicircular seats of the Sanhedrin), v. פִּתְרוֹן I.—Pl. סְהָרִים, סְהָרִין. Tosef. Shebi. II, 19; Y. ib. III, 34ᶜ bot. סיהרין (corr. acc.).—Tosef. Dem. VI, 11 זה (ש) הביא שַׂהֲרֵי שבלים וכ׳ if one brought (into the partnership) stores of ears of his own crop &c.; a. e.
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 H5470 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/סֹּֽהַר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 39:20 | 3 |
| הַ/סֹּ֑הַר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 39:22 | 2 |
| הַ/סֹּ֔הַר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 39:20 | 1 |
| הַ/סֹּ֗הַר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 39:23 | 1 |
| הַ/סֹּ֨הַר֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 39:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5470, 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
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.
