עָתֹד
to prepare
‘to prepare’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Hithpael verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Hithpael
- The reflexive or reciprocal stem (the subject acts on itself).
Form
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Hithpael, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6257 appears — 2 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.
Job 1 verse
Proverbs 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.
“to prepare” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb עתד (ʻâthad). It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than half of its appearances fall in Job. Scripture first uses it in Job 15:28. The verb spans 2 stems, from Piel to Hithpael. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6257 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Are ready 1×, Make it fit 1×
- American Standard Version: Make it ready 1×, Were ready 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Destined 1×, Prepare 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are ready 1×, Be 1×, Make it ready 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6257 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6257 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6257 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6257 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Hithpael (reflexive or reciprocal).
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Piel
- . and make it ready i.e. thy work
Hithpael
- . which [houses] were prepared (destined) for (i.e. to be) heaps of ruins.
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
[ עָתֹד ] vb. be ready
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
עָתַד
- (b. h.) to endure, stand, be ready.
- to make ready, designate.—Part. pass. מְעוּתָּד, pl. מְעוּתָּדִים, מְעוּתָּדִין. Num. R. s. 18 (ref. to Job XV, 28) ולמי הן מע׳ וכ׳ and for whom were they (the treasures) designated? For those who were to emigrate (from Egypt) &c. Yalk. Ex. 264; Mekh. B’shall., ʿĂmal., s. 1 (ref. to נצב, Ex. XVII, 9) מחר נהא מעו׳ ועומדים וכ׳ (not מעתד׳) to-morrow let us be ready (for battle), and stand on the top of the hill; נגזור תענית ונהא מעו׳ על מעשה אבות let us appoint a fast and be ready (for prayer and meditation) on the merits of the fathers. e.g. Job 15:28
עֲתַד
- 1. = h. = h. הציב, to put up, place, fix. Targ. Lam. III, 12. Targ. Prov. IX, 1 (h. text חצבה!). Ib. XV, 25. Targ. Job XVII, 6 (Var. ed. Lag. עדת׳, some ed. ערת׳; corr. acc.).—Part. pass. מְעַתַּד (= b. h. נִצָּב, cmp. מְעוּמָּד fr. עָמַד). Targ. O. Gen. XXVIII, 13 (Y. מְעַמַּד). Targ. Ps. XLV, 10; a. e.
- 2. to hold ready; to designate. Ib. L, 10. Targ. Prov. XXIV, 27 עַתְּדָהּ (some ed. עַתִּידְיָהּ, corr. acc.).—Part. pass. מְעַתַּד; f. מְעַתְּדָא. Targ. Job XV, 23 (ed. Lag. מִיעַתַּד Ithpa.). Targ. Y. I Deut. XXXII, 35; a. e.—Y. B. Bath. II, beg. 13ᵇ ע׳ ליה תכריכין held shrouds ready for him. Gen. R. s. 45 עַתֵּיד לך וכ׳ Mus. (ed. עביד), v. פּוּרְבִּי. Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵃ top. אין אתא משיחא ואנא מְעַתַּד that I be ready, when the Messiah comes; Y. Kil. IX, 32ᵇ top; (Gen. R. s. 100 איטימוס). Y. Sabb. V, 7ᵇ bot. (expl. שוזות) מְעַתְּדָן prepared (for copulation, v. Bab. Sabb. 53ᵇ bot.); a. e.
- 1. to be ready, designated, v. supra.
- 2. to endure, v. עֲתַר.
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 2 distinct written forms H6257 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הִתְעַתְּד֣וּ | Verb, Hithpael, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Job 15:28 | 1 |
| וְ/עַתְּדָ֣/הּ | Verb, Piel, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 24:27 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6257, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
