צַו
command
also: ordinance, oracle 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.
Every verse where H6673 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 28:10 צַ֤ו לָ/צָו֙ צַ֣ו לָ/צָ֔ו n c ms prep + n c ms n c ms prep + n c ms For it is precept on precept, precept on precept; line on line, line on line; here a little, there a little.
- Isaiah 28:13 צַ֣ו לָ/צָ֞ו צַ֤ו לָ/צָו֙ n c ms prep + n c ms n c ms prep + n c ms Therefore shall the word of Yahweh be to them precept on precept, precept on precept; line on line, line on line; here a little, there a little; that they may go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken.
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.
צו (tsav) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “command.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 2 of 3 verses. Ranging over 2 senses, its meaning includes “ordinance” and “oracle”. Its English rendering has broadened — “precept” classically, “order” (Berean Standard Bible) and “command” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6673 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Precept 6×
- American Standard Version: Precept 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Order 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Command 7×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6673 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H6673 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H6673 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H6673 across 9 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.
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.
- command, ordinance, oracle (meaning dubious)
- used in mocking mimicry of Isaiah's words and thus not a true divine command
Word origin
appar. n.[m.], dub. word;—in הָלַךְ אַחֲרֵי־צָ֑ו Ho 5:11 usually command, ordinance; שָׁוְא; elsewhere only צַו לָצָ֙ו צַו לָצָ֔ו (‖ קַו לָקָו קַו לָקָו), Is 28:10 in mocking mimicry of Is.’s words, and, v 13, of the unintelligible speech of י׳’s foreign agents of judgment; Ges CheComm. al. (cf. AV RV) render command upon command; Ew Di (carpenter’s) rule (+ קַו = line and rule), from √ צָוָה (whence צִיּוּן); Du CheHpt. explain as mocking sounds without sense.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צוה (tsâvâh) (H6680) — to command.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms H6673 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לָ/צָו֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 28:10 | 2 |
| צַ֣ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 28:10 | 2 |
| צַ֤ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 28:10 | 2 |
| לָ/צָ֔ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 28:10 | 1 |
| לָ/צָ֞ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 28:13 | 1 |
| צָֽו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 5:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6673, 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
Shares the same root
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.
