אָסוֹן
evil
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H611 appears — 5 distinct verses across 2 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 3 verses
- Genesis 42:4 אָסֽוֹן n c ms But Jacob didn't send Benjamin, Joseph's brother, with his brothers; for he said, "Lest perhaps harm happen to him."
- Genesis 42:38 אָסוֹן֙ n c ms He said, "My son shall not go down with you; for his brother is dead, and he only is left. If harm happens to him by the way in which you go, then you will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol."
- Genesis 44:29 אָס֑וֹן n c ms If you take this one also from me, and harm happens to him, you will bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol.'
Exodus 2 verses
- Exodus 21:22 אָס֑וֹן n c ms "If men fight and hurt a pregnant woman so that she gives birth prematurely, and yet no harm follows, he shall be surely fined as much as the woman's husband demands and the judges allow.
- Exodus 21:23 אָס֖וֹן n c ms But if any harm follows, then you must take life for life,
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.
אסון (ʼâçôwn) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “evil.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Genesis dominates its distribution — 3 of 5 verses. Debuting at Genesis 42:4, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H611 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
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 5 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 5 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).
- King James Version: Mischief 2×
- American Standard Version: Harm 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Harm 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Harm 3×, Serious injury 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H611 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H611 across 5 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H611 across 4 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H611 across 5 tagged occurrences — 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.
- evil, mischief, harm, hurt
Word origin
n.m. mischief, evil, harm; always abs. without art. Gn 42:4, 38 (as subj. of קרא), 44:29 (קרה), Ex 21:22, 23 (היה).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of uncertain derivation
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.
אָסוֹן
- , v. אנס) accident. Mekh. Mishp., N’zik. s. 8 אין א׳ אלא מיתה under accident is meant death (ref. to Gen. XLII, 38). e.g. Genesis 42:38
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 4 distinct written forms H611 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אָס֑וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 21:22 | 2 |
| אָס֖וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 21:23 | 1 |
| אָסֽוֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 42:4 | 1 |
| אָסוֹן֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 42:38 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
