צָדָה
to lie in wait
‘to lie in wait’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6658 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
Exodus 1 verse
1 Samuel 1 verse
Zephaniah 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 צדה centers on the idea of “to lie in wait.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Exodus (33%), then 1 Samuel and Zephaniah. Debuting at Exodus 21:13, it then recurs through the corpus. As a verb its force shifts by stem, across 2 stems (Qal, Niphal, and more). Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6658 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
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†: Against thee yet thou huntest 1×, Are destroyed 1×, Man lie not in wait 1×
- American Standard Version†: Against thee 1×, Are destroyed 1×, Man lie not in wait 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Are hunting me down 1×, Are laid waste 1×, Lie in wait 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Are hunting 1×, Are ruined 1×, He did 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6658 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6658 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6658 across 3† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6658 across 4† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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 2 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.
צדה I lie in wait (NH id., rare
Qal
- Pf. 3 ms. צ׳ Ex 21:13 (E; abs.); Pt. c. acc. וְאַתָּה צֹדֶה אֶת־נַפְשִׁי לְקַחְתָּהּ 1 S 24:11 (Gi; v 12 van d. H. Baer). e.g. Exodus 21:13
צדה II lay waste (NH id. (rare), Aramaic צְדִי, ܨܕܳܐ, ܨܕܺܝ id.)
Niphal
- Pf. 3 pl. נִצְדּוּ עָרֵיהֶם Zp 3:6 their cities are laid waste. e.g. Zephaniah 3:6
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. vb. lie in wait (NH id., rare; cf. (si vera l.) Biblical Aramaic צְדָא Dn 3:14);—
II. vb. lay waste (NH id. (rare), Aramaic צְדִי, ܨܕܳܐ, ܨܕܺܝ id.);—
— 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.
צָדָה
- , v. צדי.—[Yalk. Lev. 587 ואומר לו צדה, read: צְרַח, v. צָרח.]
צֵדָה
- , v. צֵידָה, a. צֵידָא.
צדי
- (cmp. צַד) to lie in wait, aim; to hunt, capture. Part. צוֹדֶה (= אוֹרֵב) ambush. R. Hash. I, 9 אם צ׳ להם if an ambush (of Samaritans) is apprehended. Yalk. Num. 787, v. infra.
- to aim. Sifré Num. 160 (expl. צְדִיָּה, Num. XXXV, 20) שצ׳ לו שמתכוון לו he aimed at him, had the intention of killing just him; Yalk. l. c. שצוֹדֶה. e.g. Numbers 35:20
צדי ²
- to remove (the inhabitants of), make desolate. Gen. R. s. 26 (ref. to עוים, Deut. II, 23, v. Ez. XXI, 32) שצָדוּ את העולם they depopulated the world. e.g. Deuteronomy 2:23
- to become desolate. Cant. R. to IV, 1 they offer seventy sacrifices on the Succoth festival in behalf of the nations שלא יִצָּדֶה העולם מהן that the world may not be depopulated of them (through their extinction); Yalk. Num. 782; Pesik. Bayom, p. 194ᵃ יצאו (Ms. O. יצרא; corr. acc.). Gen. R. l. c. גרמו לעולם שיִצּוֹד (from צדד or צוד) they were the cause that the world was desolated (through the flood).
- to be removed. Ib. הוּצְדּוּ מן העולם they were removed from the world.
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 3 distinct written forms H6658 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נִצְדּ֧וּ | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Zephaniah 3:6 | 1 |
| צָדָ֔ה | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Exodus 21:13 | 1 |
| צֹדֶ֥ה | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 24:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6658, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
