עִיט
to swoop
‘to swoop’ is one of 2 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
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (67%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5860 appears — 3 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.
1 Samuel 3 verses
- 1 Samuel 14:32 וַ/יַּ֤עַט conj + Qal wimpf 3ms and the people flew on the spoil, and took sheep, and oxen, and calves, and killed them on the ground; and the people ate them with the blood.
- 1 Samuel 15:19 וַ/תַּ֨עַט֙ conj + Qal wimpf 2ms Why then didn't you obey the voice of Yahweh, but flew on the spoil, and did that which was evil in the sight of Yahweh?"
- 1 Samuel 25:14 וַ/יָּ֥עַט conj + Qal wimpf 3ms But one of the young men told Abigail, Nabal's wife, saying, Behold, David sent messengers out of the wilderness to Greet our master; and he railed at them.
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 verb עיט centers on the idea of “to swoop.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. 1 Samuel dominates its distribution — 3 of 3 verses. Debuting at 1 Samuel 14:32, it then recurs through the corpus. BDB distinguishes 2 senses for it. 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 H5860 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Samuel 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Didst fly 1×, Flew 1×, He railed 1×
- American Standard Version†: Didst fly 1×, Flew 1×, He railed at them 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: He screamed 1×, Why did you rush 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: And 1×, He screamed 1×, Swooped down 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5860 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5860 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5860 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5860 across 4† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
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 0 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.
עיט I scream, shriek
עיט II dart greedily
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
[ עִיט ] vb. scream, shriek;—only Qal 1 S 25:14
[ עִיט ] vb. denom. dart greedily (like a bird of prey)
— 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.
עֵט
- (= b. h. עֵט; עטט, cmp. חטט) style, pencil. Targ. Jer. XVII, 1.
עֵיט
- , v. עֵט
עַיִט I
- עוּט to swing) bird of prey. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXVIII. ואין הע׳ אלא בן דוד שנמשל לע׳ the ʿayiṭ (Gen. XV, 11) is typical of the son of David who is compared to a bird of prey. Ib. כדי שלא ימשול בהם הע׳ וכ׳ that the bird of prey might not have control of them until evening; Yalk. Gen. 76; a. e. e.g. Genesis 15:11
עַיִט II
- , v. עַיִיט
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 3 distinct written forms H5860 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/יַּ֤עַט | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 1 Samuel 14:32 | 1 |
| וַ/יָּ֥עַט | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 1 Samuel 25:14 | 1 |
| וַ/תַּ֨עַט֙ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | 1 Samuel 15:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5860, 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 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
