צָבַר
to heap up
‘to heap up’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (29%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (29%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (14%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular 1 time (14%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (14%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6651 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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.
Genesis 2 verses
- Genesis 41:35 וְ/יִצְבְּרוּ conj + Qal impf 3mp Let them gather all the food of these good years that come, and lay up grain under the hand of Pharaoh for food in the cities, and let them keep it.
- Genesis 41:49 וַ/יִּצְבֹּ֨ר conj + Qal wimpf 3ms Joseph laid up grain as the sand of the sea, very much, until he stopped counting, for it was without number.
Exodus 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Habakkuk 1 verse
Zechariah 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.
The Hebrew verb צבר centers on the idea of “to heap up.” First canonically at Genesis 41:35, it enters the text early. It turns up in 7 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Genesis (29%), then Exodus and Job. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6651 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 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 7 occurrences in the concordance →
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 7 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 verses · 43%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 29%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 29%
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: Gathered 1×, He heap up 1×, He heapeth up 1×
- American Standard Version: He heap up 1×, He heapeth 1×, He heapeth up 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He heaps up 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He heaps up 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6651 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6651 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6651 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6651 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- (Qal) to heap up, pile up
- of grain, dust, silver
Word origin
[ צָבַר ] vb. heap up
— 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.
צָבַר
- (b. h.) to join; to pile up (cmp. חָמַר I); to collect. Yoma V, 1 צ׳ את הקטורת וכ׳ he heaped the frankincense upon the coals. Tam. I, 4. Y. B. Bath. III, beg. 13ᵈ כיון שצ׳ לתוכו וכ׳ as soon as he has put into it a pile of fruit, he has taken possession (of the building). Pirké d’R. El. ch. XI צ׳ את עפרו וכ׳ God collected the dust out of which to create Adam (v. infra); a. fr.—Part. pass. צָבוּר; f. צְבוּרָה; pl. צְבוּרִים, צְבוּרִין; צְבוּרוֹת. Y. Taan. II, beg. 65ᵃ רואין … כאילו צ׳ וכ׳ we look upon it as if the ashes of Isaac were heaped upon the altar. Sabb. 127ᵃ תבואה צ׳ fruits piled for storage. B. Bath. 69ᵃ אבנים צ׳ לגדר stones piled up (but not yet arranged and assorted) to build a fence with, contrad. to סדורות (cmp. Tosef. ib. III, 6, quot. s. v. סָוַר).
- to be piled, stored. Y. B. Bath. l. c. פירות ראויין לִיצָּבֵר fruits fit for storage (not only temporarily deposited).
- to be brought together, collected. Snh. 38ᵃ אדם … ה׳ עפרו the dust of which Adam was made, was collected from all parts of the world; ib.ᵇ; Ab. d’R. N. ch. I.
צְבַר
- Targ. Ruth II, 7; 8; 15, sq. (h. text לקט). Targ. Ez. IV, 2 (h. text שפך); a. fr.
צֶבֶר
- (preced.) heap, pile. Ruth R. end, v. כָּבַר. Y. Sabb. IV, 7ᵃ top צ׳ של קורות; Ohol. III, 7 Var., v. סַוָּאר.—Pl., v. צִיבּוּר
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 7 distinct written forms H6651 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/יִצְבְּרוּ | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Genesis 41:35 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּצְבְּר֥וּ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Exodus 8:14 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּצְבֹּ֥ר | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Habakkuk 1:10 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּצְבֹּ֨ר | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Genesis 41:49 | 1 |
| וַ/תִּצְבָּר | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Zechariah 9:3 | 1 |
| יִ֝צְבֹּ֗ר | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 39:6 | 1 |
| יִצְבֹּ֣ר | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 27:16 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
