אֱסָר
decree
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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.
2 distinct verses where H633 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.
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 6:12 אֱסָ֣ר אֱסָ֣ר n c ms cs n c ms Then they came near, and spoke before the king concerning the king's interdict: Haven't you signed an interdict, that every man who shall make petition to any god or man within thirty days, save to you, O king, shall be cast into the den of lions? The king answered, The thing is true, according to the law of the Medes and Persians, which doesn't alter.
- Daniel 6:15 אֱסָ֥ר n c ms cs Then these men assembled together to the king, and said to the king, Know, O king, that it is a law of the Medes and Persians, that no interdict nor statute which the king establishes may be changed.
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, אסר (ʼĕçâr) means “decree.” Its uses cluster heavily in Daniel (100% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 1 book, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Daniel 6:7. The King James Version usually renders it “decree,” while modern versions prefer “injunction” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) — see the renderings breakdown. 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 H633 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 6 verses 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 6 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 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: Decree 7×
- American Standard Version: Interdict 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Decree 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Injunction 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H633 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H633 across 7 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H633 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H633 across 7 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.
- interdict, decree, decree of restriction
Word origin
אֱסָר n.m. interdict (as binding )
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אסר (ʼĕçâr) (H632) — bond.
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.
אָסַר
- to surround, enclose (v. Schr. KAT Gloss. II, s. v.)—whence
- 1. to chain, imprison; to sentence to prison. Ber. 28ᵇ, v. אֵיסוּר.
- 2. to harness, put the horses to. Mekh. B’shall. 1. Gen. R. s. 55, v. אֲסָרָה.
- 3. to bind, obligate. Lev. R. s. 23 אילולי שא׳ וכ׳ had not the Lord bound himself by an oath; a. e.
- 4. to interdict, to declare a thing forbidden according to ritual law, opp. הִתִּיר to loosen the tie, to allow. Ḥag. 3ᵇ הללו אוֹסְרִין והללו מתירין the ones declare forbidden what the others allow. Lev. R. s. 22 מה שאָסַרְתִּי לך התרתי לך of whatever I have forbidden thee (as a class) I have allowed thee (a specimen). Erub. VIII, 4 אוֹסַר עליו he (by residing there) restricts the other (debarring him from carrying things around on the Sabbath).—Part. pass. אָסוּר, f. אֲסוּרָה (it is) forbidden. Ber. 35ᵃ א׳ לו לאדם ש׳ וכ׳ one must not &c.; a. v. fr.—Pl. אֲסוּרִים, אֲסוּרִין; f. אֲסוּרוֹת. Ter. X, 12; a. v. fr. V. אָסוּר.
- to be forbidden, to become subject to ritual prohibition. Ib. 11 אוֹסֶרֶת ואינה נֶאֱסָרֶת affects other things which come in contact with it, but is not affected; a. fr.
אֲסַר
- 1. to chain, imprison. Targ. II Kings XVII, 4; a. fr.
- 2. to bind by spell, charm. Targ. Ps. LVIII, 6; a. e.
- 3. to tie up, put on &c. Targ. Y. Gen. XLIX, 11; a. e.—B. Mets. 86ᵇ דקא א׳ ושרי that he tied up (his wound) and untied it. Sabb. 81ᵇ אֲסַרְתָּהּ לארבא she tied (stopped) the ship (by magic spell).
- 4. to bind the bowels, check diarrhœa. Gitt. 69ᵇ למֵיסַר.
- 5. to forbid. Ḥull. 109ᵇ כל דא׳ לן וכ׳, v. preced.; a. v. fr. Ib. 111ᵇ; 112ᵃ, a. fr. אָסִיר, אֲסִירֵי it is, they are, forbidden.—Ab. Zar. 37ᵇ יוסף אָסְרָא מיבעי ליה he ought to be called, ‘Joseph the forbidder.’—Y. Meg. I, 70ᶜ bot. לוֹסַר לפניו to forbid fasting on the day preceding.
- 6. *to bind one’s self by vowing a fast (cmp. Num. XXX, 3), or to be bound. Meg. Taan. XII, end, quoted and discussed Taan. 12ᵃ (v. Var. lect. in Rabb. D. S. a. l. a. notes). e.g. Numbers 30:3
- to tie (sheaves). Targ. O. Gen. XXXVII, 7.
- 1. to be imprisoned. Targ. Gen. XLII, 19; a. e.
- 2. (in Talm.) Ithpe. אִיתְּסַר to be forbidden. Targ. Y. Num. XI, 10.—Ḥull. 101ᵇ ליתסר let it be forbidden. Ib. 115ᵃ מעשה שבת ליתסרו what has been prepared on the Sabbath ought to be forbidden. Yeb. 33ᵃ קא מיתסר במלאכה he is forbidden from doing labor; a. fr.
אֱסָר
- , v. אֵיסָר
אֵסַר
- , v. אֵיסַר, אִיסְרָא I
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 H633 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֱסָ֣ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 6:12 | 2 |
| אֱסָרָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 6:8 | 2 |
| אֱסָ֑ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 6:7 | 1 |
| אֱסָ֥ר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 6:15 | 1 |
| וֶ/אֱסָרָֽ/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 6:9 | 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.
