עָבַט
to pledge
‘to pledge’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Hiphil verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘to take possession of a thing pledged’
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Absolute 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5670 appears — 4 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Deuteronomy 3 verses
- Deuteronomy 15:6 וְ/הַֽעֲבַטְתָּ֞ תַעֲבֹ֔ט conj + Hiphil wpf 2ms Qal impf 2ms For Yahweh your God will bless you, as he promised you: and you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow; and you shall rule over many nations, but they shall not rule over you.
- Deuteronomy 15:8 וְ/הַעֲבֵט֙ תַּעֲבִיטֶ֔/נּוּ conj + Hiphil inf.abs Hiphil impf 2ms + sfx pers 3ms but you shall surely open your hand to him, and shall surely lend him sufficient for his need [in that] which he wants.
- Deuteronomy 24:10 לַ/עֲבֹ֥ט prep + Qal inf.cs When you do lend your neighbor any manner of loan, you shall not go into his house to get his pledge.
Joel 1 verse
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.
“to pledge” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb עבט (ʻâbaṭ). With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. Scripture first uses it in Deuteronomy 15:6. Across 3 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Qal, Hiphil). The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5670 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 3 verses 75%
- Joel 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 25%
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: Fetch 1×, Lend 1×, Shalt surely 1×
- American Standard Version: Fetch 1×, He promised thee 1×, Him 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Borrow 1×, Collect 1×, Freely loan him 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Borrow 1×, Collect 1×, Lending 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5670 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5670 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5670 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5670 across 7 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 3 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
- to take possession of a thing pledged
Hiphil
- . and thou shalt cause many nations to give pledges
Piel
- . hardly makes sense (lend on pledge = interchange ?)
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
[ עָבַט ] vb. denom. take or give a pledge
— 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.
עֶבֶט
- , v. עָבִיט
עֲבַט
- (denom. of עֲבִיטָא, v. עֲבוֹט) to seize a pledge.
- to have one’s goods seized. B. Kam. 113ᵇ בר מתא אבר מתא מִיעֲבַט the goods of one resident may be seized for the delinquent taxes of a fellow resident (v. תָּפַס).
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 6 distinct written forms H5670 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/הַעֲבֵט֙ | Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Absolute | Deuteronomy 15:8 | 1 |
| וְ/הַֽעֲבַטְתָּ֞ | Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 15:6 | 1 |
| יְעַבְּט֖וּ/ן | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Joel 2:7 | 1 |
| לַ/עֲבֹ֥ט | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Deuteronomy 24:10 | 1 |
| תַעֲבֹ֔ט | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 15:6 | 1 |
| תַּעֲבִיטֶ֔/נּוּ | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 15:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5670, 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 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
