פִּתְגָם
decree
also: command, work, affair fuller range ↓
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.
Grammatical forms
- Particle, Definite Article 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 H6600 appears — 6 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.
Ezra 4 verses
- Ezra 4:17 פִּתְגָמָ֞/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art [Then] sent the king an answer to Rehum the chancellor, and to Shimshai the scribe, and to the rest of their companions who dwell in Samaria, and in the rest [of the country] beyond the River: Peace, and so forth.
- Ezra 5:7 פִּתְגָמָ֖/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art they sent a letter to him, in which was written thus: To Darius the king, all peace.
- Ezra 5:11 פִתְגָמָ֖/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art Thus they returned us answer, saying, We are the servants of the God of heaven and earth, and are building the house that was built these many years ago, which a great king of Israel built and finished.
- Ezra 6:11 פִּתְגָמָ֣/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art Also I have made a decree, that whoever shall alter this word, let a beam be pulled out from his house, and let him be lifted up and fastened thereon; and let his house be made a dunghill for this:
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 3:16 פִּתְגָ֖ם n c ms Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered the king, Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter.
- Daniel 4:17 פִּתְגָמָ֔/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art The sentence is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones; to the intent that the living may know that the Most High rules in the kingdom of men, and gives it to whoever he will, and sets up over it the lowest of men.
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.
פתגם — transliterated pithgâm — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “decree.” Its uses cluster heavily in Ezra (67% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 2 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its earliest occurrence is Ezra 4:17. BDB distinguishes 3 senses; alongside “decree” it spans “command”, “work”, and “affair”. 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 H6600 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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: Answer 2×, Matter 2×
- American Standard Version: Answer 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Decision 1×, Directive 1×, Is the answer 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Answer 1×, Edict 1×, Is the answer 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6600 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 H6600 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H6600 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6600 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 3 senses 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.
- command, work, affair, decree
- word, report
- decree
Word origin
פִּתְגָם n.m. command, word, affair
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פתגם (pithgâm) (H6599) — edict.
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.
פִּתְגָּם
- decree; word; affair, event (= h. דָּבָר). Targ. Num. XXI, 24, a. fr. (כפ׳) לפ׳ דחרב according to the law of war (h. text לפי).—Targ. Is. VIII, 10. Ib. IX, 7. Targ. Deut. XXIV, 1 עֲבֵרַת פ׳ (h. text ערות דבר). Targ. Gen. XX, 10; a. fr.—Pl. פִּתְגָּמִין, פִּתְגָּמַיָּא. Targ. O. Ex. XXXIV, 27; a. 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 6 distinct written forms H6600 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| פִתְגָמָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 5:11 | 1 |
| פִּתְגָ֖ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 3:16 | 1 |
| פִּתְגָמָ֔/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 4:17 | 1 |
| פִּתְגָמָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 5:7 | 1 |
| פִּתְגָמָ֞/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 4:17 | 1 |
| פִּתְגָמָ֣/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 6:11 | 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.
