צָפִיר
he-goat
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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H6842 appears in the Book of 2 Chronicles — 1 distinct verse. 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.
2 Chronicles
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.
“he-goat” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun צפיר (tsâphîyr). It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. More than half of its appearances fall in Daniel. Scripture first uses it in 2 Chronicles 29:21. It shares a root with צפר, טפר and צפור. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6842 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 3 verses 60%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 20%
- Ezra 1 verse 20%
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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 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: Goat 3×
- American Standard Version: He 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Goat 3×, Male goats 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Goat 2×, Male goat 2×, Male goats of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6842 across 6 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 H6842 across 7 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 H6842 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6842 across 8 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 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.
- he-goat
Word origin
n.m. he-goat (late);—abs. צ׳ Dn 8:5, 21; cstr. צְפִיר הָעִזִּים v 5, 8 (all in vision, symbol. of Alex.); pl. cstr. (lit.) צְפִירֵי עִזִּים 2 Ch 29:21, צְפִירֵי חַטָּאת Ezr 8:35 he-goats for a sin-offering.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צפר (tsâphar) (H6852) — to depart early.
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.
צְפִיר
- (late b. h. I) young he-goat. Targ. Lev. XVI, 9, sq. Targ. Gen. XXXVII, 31. Targ. Y. II, Gen. XXXVIII, 26 צַפִּירָא; a. fr.—Yoma 66ᵇ מאי שהי (ל)צ׳ דין דדרי חובין סגיאין Ms. M. (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note; Ar. משוך צפירה וכ׳) why does this scape-goat tarry that carries so many sins?.—Pl. צְפִירִין, צְפִירַיָּא. Targ. Lev. XVI, 7, sq.; a. fr.—Fem. צְפִירְתָּא. Ib. IV, 28; a. e.—Pes. 42ᵇ top צ׳ דלא אִפְּתַח (sub. רחמה) a she-goat that has not given birth (Ms. M. 2 ציפרתא a bird that has not laid; v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 5, a. Ar. s. v. צפיר); Gitt. 69ᵇ טחלא דצ׳ וכ׳ Rashi (ed. ציפרתא) the milt of &c.
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 6 distinct written forms H6842 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/הַ/צָּפִ֥יר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 8:21 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ֨/צָּפִ֔יר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 8:5 | 1 |
| וּ/צְפִ֥יר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 8:8 | 1 |
| וּ/צְפִירֵ֨י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | 2 Chronicles 29:21 | 1 |
| צְפִיר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 8:5 | 1 |
| צְפִירֵ֥י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezra 8:35 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6842, 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
- טפר ṭᵉphar H2953 fingernail
- צפור tsippôwr H6833 bird
- צפרדע tsᵉphardêaʻ H6854 frogs
- צפרן tsippôren H6856 fingernail
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 → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. 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 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.
