עַכְבָּר
mouse
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
4 distinct verses where H5909 appears in the Construct state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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 4 verses
- 1 Samuel 6:4 עַכְבְּרֵ֣י n c mp cs Then they said, "What shall be the trespass-offering which we shall return to him?" They said, "Five golden tumors, and five golden mice, [according to] the number of the lords of the Philistines; for one plague was on you all, and on your lords.
- 1 Samuel 6:5 עַכְבְּרֵי/כֶ֗ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 2mp Therefore you shall make images of your tumors, and images of your mice that mar the land; and you shall give glory to the God of Israel: peradventure he will lighten his hand from off you, and from off your gods, and from off your land.
- 1 Samuel 6:11 עַכְבְּרֵ֣י n c mp cs and they put the ark of Yahweh on the cart, and the coffer with the mice of gold and the images of their tumors.
- 1 Samuel 6:18 וְ/עַכְבְּרֵ֣י conj + n c mp cs and the golden mice, according to the number of all the cities of the Philistines belonging to the five lords, both of fortified cities and of country villages, even to the great stone, whereon they set down the ark of Yahweh, [which stone remains] to this day in the field of Joshua the Beth-shemite.
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.
“mouse” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun עכבר (ʻakbâr). It clusters heavily in 1 Samuel, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. It turns up in 6 verses across 3 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is Leviticus 11:29. It clusters with עכביש and עכבור under a shared root. 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 H5909 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 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) 5 verses · 83%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Mice 4×, Mouse 2×
- American Standard Version: Mice 4×, Mouse 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Rats 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mice of 3×, Mouse 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5909 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5909 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5909 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5909 across 6 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.
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.
- mouse
Word origin
Derived from עכביש (ʻakkâbîysh) (H5908) — spider.
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.
עַכְבָּר
- (b. h.) mouse. Ḥull. IX, 6 ע׳ שחציו בשר וכ׳ a mouse which is half flesh and half earth (it being believed that there is a species of mice developing from earth, v. Maim. a. l.). Ib. 126ᵇ ע׳ שבים sea-mouse (name of a fish). Hor. 13ᵃ האוכל ממה שע׳ אוכל וכ׳ he who eats what a mouse has been gnawing at, will lose his memory; a. fr.—Pl. עַכְבָּרִים, עַכְבָּרִין. Ib. Sabb. 151ᵇ. Pes. 10ᵇ; a. e.
עַכְבָּר ²
- Targ. Lev. XI, 29; a. e.—Ab. Zar. 68ᵇ. Y. Ter. X, 47ᵇ הורי … בע׳ חד לאלף R. J. decided in the case of a mouse that a proportion of one to one thousand was required to neutralize it in an intermixture. Y. Sabb. I, 3ᵇ bot. ע׳ דטורא the mountain mouse. Bab. Sabb. 121ᵇ ההוא עכבר; Bets. 36ᵇ ההוא עכברא Ms. M. (ed. ההוא עכברתא, corr. acc.; v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 50). Pes. 10ᵇ; a. e.—Snh. 29ᵇ ע׳ דשכיב אדינרי a mouse lying on denars, a miser.—Pl. עַכְכָּרַיָּיא. Y. B. Mets. III, end, 9ᵇ
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 5 distinct written forms H5909 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| עַכְבְּרֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | 1 Samuel 6:4 | 2 |
| וְ/הָ/עַכְבָּ֑ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 66:17 | 1 |
| וְ/הָ/עַכְבָּ֖ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:29 | 1 |
| וְ/עַכְבְּרֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | 1 Samuel 6:18 | 1 |
| עַכְבְּרֵי/כֶ֗ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | 1 Samuel 6:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5909, 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
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.
