עַקְרָב
scorpion
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 5 times (83%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6137 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
1 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 12:11 בָּ/עַקְרַבִּֽים prep det + n c mp Now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
- 1 Kings 12:14 בָּ/עַקְרַבִּֽים prep det + n c mp and spoke to them after the counsel of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 10:11 בָּֽ/עֲקְרַבִּֽים prep det + n c mp Now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father chastised you with whips, but I [will chastise you] with scorpions.
- 2 Chronicles 10:14 בָּ/עֲקְרַבִּֽים prep det + n c mp and spoke to them after the counsel of the young men, saying, My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add thereto: my father chastised you with whips, but I [will chastise you] with scorpions.
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.
The Hebrew noun עקרב centers on the idea of “scorpion.” Its earliest occurrence is Deuteronomy 8:15. Spanning 6 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. 1 Kings dominates its distribution — 2 of 6 verses. 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 H6137 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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 →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Kings 2 verses 33%
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 33%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 17%
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) 3 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 33%
- 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: I will chastise you with scorpions 2×, You with scorpions 2×
- American Standard Version: I will chastise you with scorpions 2×, You with scorpions 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Scorpions 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Scorpions 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6137 across 6 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6137 across 6 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 H6137 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6137 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.
- scorpion
Word origin
n.m.* f.] as in NH Syriac Mand. Arabic (Levy gives Talm. [Aramaic] as m., but are readings correct?), Nö (privately). scorpion (appar. quadrilit.: NH id.; Assyrian aḳrabu; Ethiopic ዐቅረብ:; Arabic عَقْرَبٌ; עַקְרַבָּא);—abs. עַקְרָב Dt 8:15 (coll.; of wilderness), pl. עַקְרַבִּים Ez 2:6 (fig. of enemies); יִסַּר בָּע׳ 1 K 12:11, 14 = 2 Ch 10:11, 14, i.e. scourges with points, stings.—Vid. also מַעֲלֵה עַקְרַבִּים.
— 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.
עַקְרָב
- c. (b. h.; prob. fr. עקב, with anorg. ר; cmp. עַרְקוֹב)
- 1. scorpion. Ab. V, 5 ולא הזיק נחש וע׳ וכ׳ nor did ever a serpent or a scorpion harm anybody in Jerusalem. Ib. II, 10, v. עֲקִיצָה. Sabb. 121ᵇ ע׳ שבחדייב the scorpion of Adiabene; Y. ib. XIV, beg. 14ᵇ. Num. R. s. 10 היין משול בע׳ (some ed. כע׳) wine is compared to a scorpion; מה ע׳ מכה בעוקצו … סופו as the scorpion wounds with its tail, so wine wounds at the end. Sifra K’dosh., Par. 1, ch. II עקצתו ע׳ if a scorpion stung him; a. fr.—Pl. עַקְרַבִּים, עַקְרַבִּין. Sabb. l. c. Gen. R. s. 84 (ref. to Gen. XXXVII, 24) מים אין בו אבל נחשים וע׳ וכ׳ water was not, but serpents and scorpion were therein; a. fr. e.g. Genesis 37:24
- 2. the constellation Scorpio. Pesik. R. s. 20. Num. R. l. c. כל שעה … אין ע׳ וכ׳ as long as Kimah (v. כִּימָה) is visible, Scorpio is invisible; a. fr.
- 3. bit of a bridle. Kel. XI, 5.
- 4. עַקְרַב בית הבד the iron-shod part of the pressbeam. Ib. XII, 3.
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 H6137 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בָּ/עַקְרַבִּֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 12:11 | 2 |
| בָּ/עֲקְרַבִּֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 10:14 | 1 |
| בָּֽ/עֲקְרַבִּֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 10:11 | 1 |
| וְ/עַקְרָ֔ב | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 8:15 | 1 |
| עַקְרַבִּ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 2:6 | 1 |
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.
