עֹפֶרֶת
lead
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 H5777 appears — 9 distinct verses across 6 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Numbers 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Ezekiel 3 verses
- Ezekiel 22:18 וְ/עוֹפֶ֨רֶת֙ conj + n c fs Son of man, the house of Israel is become dross to me: all of them are brass and tin and iron and lead, in the midst of the furnace; they are the dross of silver.
- Ezekiel 22:20 וְ/עוֹפֶ֤רֶת conj + n c fs As they gather silver and brass and iron and lead and tin into the midst of the furnace, to blow the fire on it, to melt it; so will I gather you in my anger and in my wrath, and I will lay you there, and melt you.
- Ezekiel 27:12 וְ/עוֹפֶ֔רֶת conj + n c fs Tarshish was your merchant by reason of the multitude of all kinds of riches; with silver, iron, tin, and lead, they traded for your wares.
Zechariah 2 verses
- Zechariah 5:7 עֹפֶ֖רֶת n c fs (and, behold, a talent of lead was lifted up); and this is a woman sitting in the midst of the ephah basket."
- Zechariah 5:8 הָ/עֹפֶ֖רֶת ptcl def.art + n c fs He said, "This is Wickedness;" and he threw her down into the midst of the ephah basket; and he threw the weight of lead on its mouth.
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.
The Hebrew noun עופרת centers on the idea of “lead.” Its earliest occurrence is Exodus 15:10. It turns up in 9 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Ezekiel (33%), then Zechariah and Exodus. It shares a root with עפר, עפר and עפר. 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 H5777 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 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 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 22%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 11%
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: Lead 9×
- American Standard Version: Lead 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lead 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lead 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5777 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5777 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 H5777 across 9 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5777 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 1 sense 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.
- lead
Word origin
n.m. Je 6:29(si vera l. Qr) lead (√ dub.; prob. foreign word; cf. 𝔗 אֲבָרָא lead, Syriac ܐܰܒܳܪܳܐ, and (as Aramaic loan-word) Arabic أَبَار [v. Dozy], Frä152; perhaps also Assyrian abaru, a metal, magnesite according to HilprAssyriaca i (1894), 80 ff. Hpt1b. 83);—כִּכַּר ע׳ Zc 5:7 a round weight (disc) of lead, אֶבֶן־הָעו׳ v 5; with other metals (v. בְּדִיל): עוֹ׳ Ez 22:18, 20; 27:12, הָעֹפָ֑רֶת Nu 31:22 (P); עֹפ׳ also Jb 19:24 (with which chiselled letters are filled according to Di and most; Bu reads בְּע׳ in [a tablet of] lead); also (as flux) Je 6:29 (reading Qr; so Gf Co; emend. Gie); עוֹ׳ in sim. Ex 15:10 (song).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עפר (ʻâphar) (H6080) — to dust.
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.
עוֹפֶרֶת
- lead. Mekh. B’shall., Shir., s. 5; Yalk. Ex. 246.
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 9 distinct written forms H5777 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הָ/עֹפֶ֖רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Zechariah 5:8 | 1 |
| הָ/עֹפָֽרֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 31:22 | 1 |
| וְ/עֹפָ֑רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Job 19:24 | 1 |
| וְ/עוֹפֶ֔רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 27:12 | 1 |
| וְ/עוֹפֶ֤רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 22:20 | 1 |
| וְ/עוֹפֶ֨רֶת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 22:18 | 1 |
| כַּֽ/עוֹפֶ֔רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 15:10 | 1 |
| עֹפֶ֖רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Zechariah 5:7 | 1 |
| עֹפָ֑רֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 6:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5777, 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 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
