עַ֫יִט
bird of prey
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 6 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5861 appears — 6 distinct verses across 5 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 18:6 לְ/עֵ֣יט הָ/עַ֔יִט prep + n c ms cs ptcl def.art + n c ms They shall be left together to the ravenous birds of the mountains, and to the animals of the earth; and the ravenous birds shall summer on them, and all the animals of the earth shall winter on them.
- Isaiah 46:11 עַ֔יִט n c ms calling a ravenous bird from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country; yes, I have spoken, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it.
Jeremiah 1 verse
Ezekiel 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.
עיט — transliterated ʻayiṭ — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “bird of prey.” Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 15:11. Spanning 6 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Isaiah (33% of all occurrences). Sharing its root, it stands alongside עיט, עט and עיטם. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5861 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 17%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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: Fowls 3×
- American Standard Version: Bird 2×, Ravenous birds 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bird of prey 3×, Birds of prey 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bird of prey 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5861 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5861 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5861 across 8 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 H5861 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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.
- bird of prey, a swooper
Word origin
n.m. Je 12:9 bird(s) of prey (from scream);—abs. ע׳ Gn 15:11 +, עָ֑יִט Jb 28:7, c. art. (perhaps) הַע׳ Je 12:9 b (cf. Gie; הַע׳ interrog. v a); cstr. עֵיט Is 18:6; Ez 39:4;—usually coll. Gn 15:11 (JE), Is 18:6 Jb 28:7, עֵיט הָרִים Is 18:6, עֵיט צִפּוֹר כָּל־כָּנָף Ez 39:4; fig. of foes of Judah Je 12:9 b; of single bird v 9 a (fig. of Judah), Is 46:11 (fig. of invader, ‖ אִישׁ עֲצָתִי).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עיט (ʻîyṭ) (H5860) — to swoop.
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 8 distinct written forms H5861 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/עַ֖יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 12:9 | 1 |
| הַ/עַ֨יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 12:9 | 1 |
| הָ/עַ֔יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 18:6 | 1 |
| הָ/עַ֖יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 15:11 | 1 |
| לְ/עֵ֣יט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 18:6 | 1 |
| לְ/עֵ֨יט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 39:4 | 1 |
| עַ֔יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 46:11 | 1 |
| עָ֑יִט | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 28:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5861, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
