צָלָה
to roast
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
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 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 H6740 appears — 3 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.
1 Samuel 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 44:16 יִצְלֶ֥ה Qal impf 3ms He burns part of it in the fire; with part of it he eats flesh; he roasts roast, and is satisfied; yes, he warms himself, and says, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire.
- Isaiah 44:19 אֶצְלֶ֥ה Qal impf 1cs None calls to mind, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire; yes, also I have baked bread on the coals of it; I have roasted flesh and eaten it: and shall I make the residue of it an abomination? shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?
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.
“to roast” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb צלה (tsâlâh). A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Isaiah. First canonically at 1 Samuel 2:15, it enters the text early. It shares a root with צלי. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6740 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.
- #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 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: He roasteth 1×, Roast 1×, Thereof i have roasted 1×
- American Standard Version: He roasteth 1×, Roast 1×, Thereof 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He roasts 1×, I roasted 1×, Roast 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He roasts 1×, I roasted 1×, Roast 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6740 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6740 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6740 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6740 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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 roast
Word origin
[ צָלָה ] vb. roast flesh
— 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.
צִלָּה I
- , v. צִילָּה
צִלָּה II
- (b. h.) pr. n. f. Zillah, one of the two wives of Lamekh. Gen. R. s. 23; a. e.
צלי
- (b. h.) [to turn, cmp. טְוִי II,] to roast. Tosef. Pes. V, 9 בישלו … צְלָאוֹ if he cooked (the Passover lamb) and then roasted it; Pes. 41ᵃ. Ib. צלאו כל צורכו if he roasted it as much as needed (well-done, contrad. to נא). Ib. VII, 1 כיצד צוֹלִין וכ׳ how must the Passover lamb be roasted? Ib. 2 צא וצְלֵה לנו וכ׳ go out and roast the lamb for us &c. Y. ib. VII, beg. 34ᵃ צְלָייוֹ בגדי וכ׳ if he roasted it together with a secular (not sacrificial) kid. Ib. bot. בשר לִצְלוֹת meat to roast it; a. fr.—Part. pass. צָלוּי; f. צְלוּיָה, צְלוּיָיה. Ab. Zar. 29ᵃ ביצה צ׳ a roasted egg; a. e.
- to be roasted. Y. Pes. l. c. נִצְלָה מקצתו וכ׳ if it was roasted partly by the heat of the stove &c.; a. fr.—Sabb. I, 10 כדי שיִצּוֹלוּ וכ׳ (fr. צול) in time to be roasted before the Sabbath begins.
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 H6740 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֶצְלֶ֥ה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Isaiah 44:19 | 1 |
| יִצְלֶ֥ה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 44:16 | 1 |
| לִ/צְל֖וֹת | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | 1 Samuel 2:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6740, 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.
