עָפַר
to dust
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6080 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
2 Samuel 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.
At its core, עפר (ʻâphar) means “to dust.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in 2 Samuel (100% of all occurrences). Scripture uses it exactly once, at 2 Samuel 16:13. From the same root come עפר, עופרת and עפר. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6080 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Samuel 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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).
- King James Version: Cast 1×
- American Standard Version: Him 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Flung 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He dusted 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6080 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6080 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6080 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6080 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- (Piel) to dust, powder
Word origin
[ עָפַר ] vb. denom. Pi. 2 S 16:13 and kept dusting (him) with dust (throwing [lumps of] dry earth at him).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עפר (ʻâphâr) (H6083) — 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.
עֹפֶר
- , pl. עֳפָרִים, v. עוֹפֶר.
עָפַר
- , Pi. עִיפֵּר (b. h.; to cast dust, cover with mud.
- to be soiled. Lam. R. introd. (R. Abbahu 6) והם ישנים … ומִתְעַפְּרִים בעפר they sleep on the bare earth and become soiled with dust; ib. to III, 13.
עָפָר
- עפר to be thick, dust, mud, sand, mortar. Gen. R. s. 14 (ref. to Gen. II, 7) ע׳ זכר אדמה נקבה היוצר מביא ע׳ זכר וכ׳ ‘afar represents the male element, ădamah, the female; the potter takes male dust (coarse sand) and female earth (soft clay), in order that the vessels be strong. Sot. II, 2 נוטל ע׳ מתחתיה he (the priest) takes earth from under it (the marble slab). Ib. 16ᵃ מצינו אפר שקרוי ע׳ we find that ashes are likewise called ‘afar; Ḥull. 88ᵇ; Gen. R. s. 49ᵇ. Ib. עֲפַר סוטה the dust used in preparing the Water of Jealousy; עֲ׳ כיסוי the earth or ashes used for covering up the blood at slaughtering (Lev. XVII, 13); Num. R. s. 9. Ib. זכתה … ואנכי ע׳ ואפר לא זכתה תחזור לעַפְרָהּ if she is worthy (innocent), let a son descend from her like Abraham, of whom it is written, ‘And I am dust and ashes’ (Gen. XVIII, 27); if she is unworthy, let her return to her native dust. Ib. עֲ׳ זהב העגל the gold dust of the calf. Y. B. Mets. VIII, end, 11ᵈ ע׳ שחור black potter’s earth; a. fr.—Gen. R. s. 94 עַפְרוֹ של יצחק (ed. Wil. אֶפְרוֹ), v. אֵפֶר.—Pl. עֲפָרוֹת, constr. עַפְרוֹת. Num. R. l. c. (ref. to ומן העפר, Num. V, 17) [read:] זהו ע׳ הזהב אשר טחן this refers to the gold dust which he (Moses) made by grinding (Deut. IX, 21). Gen. R. s. 26 שהיו בקיאים בע׳ וכ׳ they were experts on the qualities of soil like serpents; a. e. e.g. Genesis 2:7
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6080, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
