אֶפְרָתִי
Ephrathite
BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Ephrathite’ 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
- Gentilic
- A noun naming a member of a people, tribe, or region of origin (e.g. an Israelite, a Moabite).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H673 appears — 5 distinct verses across 4 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.
Judges 1 verse
Ruth 1 verse
1 Samuel 2 verses
- 1 Samuel 1:1 אֶפְרָתִֽי n Gentilic ms Now there was a certain man of Ramathaim Zophim, of the hill-country of Ephraim, and his name was Elkanah, the son of Jeroham, the son of Elihu, the son of Tohu, the son of Zuph, an Ephraimite:
- 1 Samuel 17:12 אֶפְרָתִ֜י n Gentilic ms Now David was the son of that Ephrathite of Bethlehem Judah, whose name was Jesse; and he had eight sons: and the man was an old man in the days of Saul, stricken [in years] among men.
1 Kings 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.
אפרתי (ʼEphrâthîy) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Ephrathite.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. 1 Samuel dominates its distribution — 2 of 5 verses. First canonically at Judges 12:5, it enters the text early. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H673 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 80%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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: Ephrathite 2×
- American Standard Version: Ephraimite 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Ephraimite 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ephraimite 2×, Ephrathite 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H673 across 4 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H673 across 4 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H673 across 5 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H673 across 5 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.
Senses in the full BDB
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.
- 1. Ephraimite, cf. אֶפְרָתָה 1. Ju 12:5 1 S 1:1 (of ancestor of Elkanah) 1 K 11:26 (of Jerob.) e.g. Judges 12:5
- 2. from א׳ 2; א׳ מִבֵּית לֶחֶם 1 S 17:12 (of Jesse); pl. אֶפְרָתִים מִבֵּית לֶחֶם Ru 1:2. e.g. 1 Samuel 17:12
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
Derived from אפרת (ʼEphrâth) (H672) — Ephrath.
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.
אֶפְרָתִי
- (perh. = b. h.) of Ephratha, Ephrathi. Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵃ top יוסף א׳; Y. Kil. IX, 32ᵇ top יוסי א׳; (Gen. R. s. 100 הַפְּרָתִי).—Pl. אֶפְרָתִים. Ruth R. to I, 2 expl. פלטיאני courtiers, noblemen.—Ch. אֶפְרָתִין. Targ. Ruth l. c. א׳ רבנין (in Ms. our w. omitted).
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 4 distinct written forms H673 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֶפְרָתִ֜י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 11:26 | 2 |
| אֶפְרָתִ֔ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ruth 1:2 | 1 |
| אֶפְרָתִֽי | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 1:1 | 1 |
| הַֽ/אֶפְרָתִ֥י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 12:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H673, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ephrathite). 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
A citizen of Ephratah, the old name of Bethlehem (Ruth 1:2; 1 Sam. 17:12), or Bethlehem-Judah.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
+ An inhabitant of Bethlehem. (Ruth 1:2) + An Ephraimite. (1 Samuel 1:1; 1 Kings 11:26)
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
