פְּתוֹר
Pethor
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Pethor’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H6604 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.
Numbers 1 verse
Deuteronomy 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.
פתור (Pᵉthôwr) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Pethor.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Numbers, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. It first appears in Numbers 22:5. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6604 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
- Numbers 1 verse 50%
- Deuteronomy 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) 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: Pethor 2×
- American Standard Version: Pethor 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pethor 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pethor 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6604 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6604 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6604 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6604 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 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.
- Pethor = "soothsayer"
- a town of Mesopotamia and the home of Balaam; located on a river; site unknown
Word origin
פְּתוֹר n.pr.loc. home of Balaam
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign origin
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.
פתוור
- , Targ. II Esth. III, 3 פְּתַוְּורֵיה, פְּתַוְרֵיה, prob. a corrupt dittography of the preceding סַכְרֵיה.
פתור
- , v. פתוור
פָּתוֹר
- (פתר to extend, cmp. Assyr. paššaru dish, v. Fränkel, Lexicogr. p. 53) table. Targ. Ex. XXV, 23; a. fr.—Targ. Prov. IX, 2 פתורת׳.—Targ. Y. Gen. XXIII, 16 פָּתוֹר (ed. Vien. פְּ׳) money-changer’s table.—Sabb. 36ᵃ פתורה פתורתא פתורתא פתורה what formerly was called pathora (a small table, plate) is now called pathorta, and vice versa. Taan. 25ᵃ פ׳ דדהבא (Ms. M. תכא) a golden table. Sabb. 129ᵃ, v. יוֹנָס; a. fr.—B. Kam. 19ᵇ bot. בבהמה ופ׳ it means a domestic animal eating from the table, v. פְּתִיתָה.—Pl. פָּתוֹרִין, פָּתוֹרַיָּא. Targ. Is. XXI, 5. Targ. Ez. XL, 43; a. e.—Nidd. 20ᵃ הא בפָתוֹרֵי (some ed. sing.) ‘dark clothes coming from abroad’ refers to those worn at the table (vestes cenatoriae or synthesis), v. אוֹלָרִין.
פָּתוֹר ²
- (פְּתַר) interpreter. Koh. R. to X, 10 פ׳ חילמיא interpreter of dreams.
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 H6604 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מִ/פְּת֛וֹר | Noun, Proper | Deuteronomy 23:4 | 1 |
| פְּ֠תוֹרָ/ה | Noun, Proper | Numbers 22:5 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Pethor). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Interpretation of dreams, identified with Pitru, on the west bank of the Euphrates, a few miles south of the Hittite capital of Carchemish (Num. 22:5, "which is by the river of the land of the children of [the god] Ammo"). (See BALAAM.)
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(soothsayer), a town of Mesopotamia, where Balaam resided, and situated "upon the river," possibly the Euphrates. (Numbers 22:5; 23:4) Its position is wholly unknown.
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
