צֶ֫מֶר
wool
‘wool’ is one of 3 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
- 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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6785 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 1:18 כַּ/צֶּ֥מֶר prep det + n c ms "Come now, and let us reason together," says Yahweh: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
- Isaiah 51:8 וְ/כַ/צֶּ֖מֶר conj + prep det + n c ms For the moth shall eat them up like a garment, and the worm shall eat them like wool; but my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation to all generations.
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.
“wool” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun צמר (tsemer). First canonically at Leviticus 13:47, it enters the text early. It appears 16 verses across 9 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Leviticus. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. See the sense tree, 16-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6785 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 →
- 16
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 16 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,752
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,752 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 16 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 16 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 9 verses · 56%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 5 verses · 31%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 13%
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: Wool 7×, Woollen 3×, Like wool 2×
- American Standard Version: Wool 6×, Like wool 2×, Woollen 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Wool 10×, Like wool 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Wool 12×, Like wool 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6785 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H6785 across 16 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6785 across 16 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6785 across 17 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 3 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.
- wool
- whiteness (metaphorically)
- wool (in garments)
Word origin
n.m. Ez 44:17 wool;—abs. צ׳ Is 1:18, צָ֑מֶר Lv 13:48; cstr. צֶ֫מֶר Ez 27:18 (v. infr.); sf. צַמְרִי Ho 2:7, 11;—wool (usually c. פִּשְׁתִּי(ם) flax, linen): in natural state גִּזַּת הַצּ׳ Ju 6:37, אֵילִים צ׳ 2 K 3:4 (but constr. difficult, and צ׳ perhaps gloss); Ho 2:7, 11 (as gift of value); white Is 1:18 (sim.; ‖ שֶׁלֶג), sim. of snow ψ 147:16 (from white flakes); white (?) wool as merchandise Ez 27:18 (צ׳ צָ֑חַר, but on text v. צַּ֫חַר), Pr 31:13; prey of moth Is 51:8 (sim.); made up into garments Dt 22:11, בֶּגֶד צ׳ Lv 13:47, 59 cf. v 48, 52; בֶּגֶד om. Ez 34:3; 44:17.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root probably meaning to be shaggy
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.
צֶמֶר
- צמר to be pressed, thick, warm; cmp. עמר) wool, hair. Sabb. 54ᵃ; Shebu. 6ᵇ, v. כָּבַן. Kil. VII, 2 צ׳ גפן, v. גֶּפֶן. Y. ib. II, 27ᵈ גפן הצ׳ cotton tree. Tosef. Sabb. IX (X), 3 צ׳ ארנבים (not ביים …) hair of hares. Gen. R. s. 37 (ref. to צמרי, Gen. X, 18) (the inhabitants of Ḥamatz are named Zemarites,) שהן עושין בצ׳ because they work in wool. Yeb. 4ᵇ צ׳ לפשתים ופשתים לצ׳ woolen show-fringes for linen garments, and linen for woolen garments; a. fr. e.g. Genesis 10:18
צַמָּר
- (preced.) dealer or worker in wool. — Pl. צַמָּרִים, צַמָּרִין. Kel. XXIX, 6 חוט … של צ׳ the wool-dealers’ (or weavers’) cord of balances; B. Bath. 89ᵃ. Erub. X, 9 שוק של צ׳ the wool-dealers’ market. Eduy. III, 4 רשאין הצ׳ וכ׳ the wool-weavers and the dyers are permitted to form a partnership to buy up whatever goods come to town; a. fr.—[Y. B. Bath. VIII, 16ᵃ bot. מיוצאי צ׳, read: מִצְרַיִם.]
צמר
- , v. צְמַרְמוֹרַיָּיה
צְמַר
- to be pressed, hot.
- to heat. B. Kam. 60ᵃ דצַמְּרָהּ צַמּוּרֵי he increased the heat of the coals by breathing on them.
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 13 distinct written forms H6785 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/צֶּ֣מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 34:3 | 2 |
| צֶ֔מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 44:17 | 2 |
| צַמְרִ֣/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Hosea 2:5 | 2 |
| בַּ/צֶּ֨מֶר֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 13:52 | 1 |
| הַ/צֶּ֖מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 6:37 | 1 |
| וְ/כַ/צֶּ֖מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 51:8 | 1 |
| וְ/לַ/צָּ֑מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 13:48 | 1 |
| וְ/צֶ֥מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 27:18 | 1 |
| כַּ/צֶּ֥מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 1:18 | 1 |
| כַּ/צָּ֑מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 147:16 | 1 |
| צֶ֣מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 31:13 | 1 |
| צֶ֥מֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 22:11 | 1 |
| צָֽמֶר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 3:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6785, 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
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 15 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 16 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
- Leviticus 13:47
- Deuteronomy 22:11
- Judges 6:37
- 2 Kings 3:4
- Proverbs 31:13
- Isaiah 1:18
- Ezekiel 27:18
- Hosea 2:5
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.
