סַפַּ֫חַת
scab
also: eruption, lesion 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
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5597 appears — 2 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.
Leviticus 2 verses
- Leviticus 13:2 סַפַּ֨חַת֙ n c fs "When a man shall have a rising in his body's skin, or a scab, or a bright spot, and it becomes in the skin of his body the plague of leprosy, then he shall be brought to Aaron the priest, or to one of his sons the priests:
- Leviticus 14:56 וְ/לַ/סַּפַּ֖חַת conj + prep det + n c fs and for a rising, and for a scab, and for a bright spot;
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.
“scab” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun ספחת (çappachath). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. It clusters heavily in Leviticus, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Leviticus 13:2. Not a single-sense word, it carries 2 senses, among them “eruption” and “lesion”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5597 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Scab 2×
- American Standard Version: Or a scab 1×, Scab 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Rash 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Rash 1×, Scab 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5597 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5597 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5597 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5597 across 2 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.
- eruption, scab, lesion
- either malignant or benign
Word origin
n.f. eruption, scab, either malignant or harmless;—abs. שְׂאֵת אוֹ ס׳ אוֹ בְהֶרֶת Lv 13:2 cf. 14:56.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ספח (çâphach) (H5596) — to join.
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.
סַפַּחַת
- rising on the skin, sore. Sifra Thazr., Neg., ch. I (ref. to Lev. XIII, 2) ס׳ שני לשאת (not לבהרת) sappaḥath is secondary to (is a species of) s’eth. Ib.; Shebu. 6ᵇ אין ס׳ אלא טפילה the word sappaḥath itself intimates an attachment to something (ref. to I Sam. II, 36). Yeb. 47ᵇ; 109ᵇ, a. e. קשים גרים לישראל כס׳ בעור proselytes are as bad to Israel as a sore on the skin (ref. to ונספחו, Is. XIV, 1). e.g. Leviticus 13:2
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 H5597 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/לַ/סַּפַּ֖חַת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 14:56 | 1 |
| סַפַּ֨חַת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 13:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5597, 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
- מספחה miçpâchâh H4555 veil
- מספחת miçpachath H4556 scab
- משפח mispâch H4939 bloodshed
- ספיח çâphîyach H5599 volunteer plants
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist 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.
