פֶּ֫רַע
commander
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 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 H6546 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Judges 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.
“commander” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun פרעה (parʻâh). It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. More than half of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. Its earliest occurrence is Deuteronomy 32:42. Related forms include פרע and פרעתון. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6546 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 →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 50%
- Judges 1 verse 50%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Revenges 1×
- American Standard Version†: Leaders 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Princes 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Leaders of 1×, Long hair 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6546 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6546 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6546 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6546 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
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 0 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.
פרעה I [m.] leader (?)
פרעה II [m.] long hair of head, locks
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
I. n.[m.] leader (?);—pl. abs. בִּפְרֹעַ פְּרָעוֹת Ju 5:2 for the leading of the leaders (𝔊A Be Bu al., but uncertain; 𝔊B Symm, cf. WeIsr. u. Jüd. Gesch. (2), 97; Heid. (2), 123 al., for the loosing of locks [ii. פֶּרַע], in vow of war; on these and other views v. especially GFMad loc.; conj. also by LambertRÉJ xxiv. 140 GrimmeZMG 1 (1896), 572 CheJQ, July 1899, 561 [reading ברכו]); cstr. מֵרֹאשׁ פַּרְעוֹת אוֹיֵב Dt 32:42 from the head of leaders of the foe 𝔊 Di Steuern al.; Kn Ke Dr al. from the long-haired heads of the foe.
II. n.[m.] long hair of head, locks;—פ׳ abs. Ez 44:20; cstr. פ׳ שְׂעַר רֹאשׁוֹ Nu 6:5 (P).—Ju 5:2 Dt 32:42, v. i. פֶּרַע.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פרע (peraʻ) (H6545) — hair.
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.
פְּרָעָה
- , pl. פְּרָעוֹת(b. h.;
- 1. = preced., wild irregular growth, esp. the case of protruding boughs on one of which is an uncleanness, v. סְכָכָה. Ohol. VIII, 2 והפ׳, expl. היוצאות מן הגדר which protrude from the hedge; Tosef. ib. IX, 3 פֶּרַע היוצא מן וכ׳; Naz. VII, 3; 54ᵇ. Y. ib. VII, 56ᶜ
- 2. (homilet.) payment, retribution. Sabb. 119ᵇ (ref. to Jud. V, 2) מ"ט בפרוע פרעות משום דברכו ה׳ why are decreed punishments disarranged (reversed)? Because of ‘praise the Lord’; Yalk. Jud. 46. e.g. Judges 5:2
פַּרְעֹה
- (b. h.) pr. n. m. Pharaoh, the Egyptian king. M. Kat. 18ᵃ פ׳ שהיה בימי משה the Pharaoh of Moses’ time. Ex. R. s. 8 מי גרם לפ׳ שילקה what was the cause of Pharaoh’s being smitten?; a. v. fr.
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 H6546 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| פְּרָעוֹת֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Judges 5:2 | 1 |
| פַּרְע֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Deuteronomy 32:42 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6546, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). 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.
