סָמַר
to bristle
‘to bristle’ is one of 3 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5568 appears in the Book of Psalms — 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.
Psalms
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.
סמר (çâmar) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to bristle.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Job, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Debuting at Job 4:15, it then recurs through the corpus. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Qal and Piel. 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 H5568 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Stood up 1×, Trembleth 1×
- American Standard Version: Stood up 1×, Trembleth 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bristled 1×, Trembles 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Shudders 1×, Was bristling 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5568 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5568 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5568 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5568 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Pf. 3 ms. ס׳ מִפַּחְדְּךָ בְשָׂרִי ψ 119:120 from fear of thee did my flesh bristle up, ‘creep.’ e.g. Psalms 119:120
Piel
- Impf. תְּסַמֵּר שַׂעֲרַת בְּשָׂרִי Jb 4:15. e.g. Job 4:15
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. bristle up (LagBN 106 cp. Arabic شَمَرَ contract; in that case ס׳ for שׂ׳);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
סָמַר
- [(b. h.) to stand erect, bristle.—Denom. מַסְמֵר; whence סָמַר] to nail, fasten. Y. Meg. IV, 75ᶜ bot. זְמָרוֹ he nailed it (against the door, in an inappropriate place).
- to stud with nails. Kel. XIV, 2.—Part. pass. מְסוּמָּר. Sabb. VI, 2, a. fr. סנדל המס׳ a nail-studded shoe.
סְמַר I
- Pa. סַמֵּר same.—Part. pass. מְסַמַּר, מְסַמְּרָא. Y. Ḥag. III, beg. 78ᵈ עד … כיפא מ׳ to this day it is called the nail-studded rock.
סְמַר II
- (= h. שָׁמַר), Ithpa. אִסְתַּמַּר, אִסְטַ׳ to take heed, beware. Targ. O. Ex. XXIII, 21. Targ. Josh. VI, 18 (some ed. אסט׳). Targ. Job XXXVI, 21 (Ms. אסט׳); a. fr.—[Ib. XXXIV, 17, v. סַמְתֵּר.]
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 2 distinct written forms H5568 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| סָמַ֣ר | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 119:120 | 1 |
| תְּ֝סַמֵּ֗ר | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Job 4:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5568, 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
