צָפַף
to chirp
‘to chirp’ 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Pilpel
- A reduplicated intensive stem of two-letter or hollow roots.
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Pilpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Pilpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Pilpel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Pilpel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6850 appears — 4 distinct verses across 1 book. 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 4 verses
- Isaiah 8:19 הַֽ/מְצַפְצְפִ֖ים ptcl def.art + Pilpel ptcp.act mp When they shall tell you, "Consult with those who have familiar spirits and with the wizards, who chirp and who mutter:" shouldn't a people consult with their God? on behalf of the living [should they consult] with the dead?
- Isaiah 10:14 וּ/מְצַפְצֵֽף conj + Pilpel ptcp.act ms and my hand has found as a nest the riches of the peoples; and as one gathers eggs that are forsaken, have I gathered all the earth: and there was none that moved the wing, or that opened the mouth, or chirped.
- Isaiah 29:4 תְּצַפְצֵֽף Pilpel impf 3fs You shall be brought down, and shall speak out of the ground, and your speech shall be low out of the dust; and your voice shall be as of one who has a familiar spirit, out of the ground, and your speech shall whisper out of the dust.
- Isaiah 38:14 אֲצַפְצֵ֔ף Pilpel impf 1cs Like a swallow [or] a crane, so did I chatter; I did moan as a dove; my eyes fail [with looking] upward: Lord, I am oppressed, be my collateral.
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.
The Hebrew verb צפף centers on the idea of “to chirp.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 4 of 4 verses. Debuting at Isaiah 8:19, it then recurs through the corpus. BDB distinguishes 3 senses for it. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6850 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 4 verses 100%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 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: Did i chatter 1×, Or peeped 1×, Peep 1×
- American Standard Version: Chirp 1×, Did i chatter 1×, Or chirped 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: I chirp 1×, Or chirped 1×, Whisper 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: I chirp 1×, Ones chirping 1×, Or chirping 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6850 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6850 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6850 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6850 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Pilpel) to chirp, peep
- of birds
- of ghosts
Word origin
[ צָפַף ] vb. Pilp. chirp, peep
— 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.
צָפַף
- (cmp. טָפַף I) to touch closely, press; to squeeze into, weave (v. צִיפָּא). Midr. Till. to Ps. XVIII, 41 השחיל וצַף הוא בעצמו וכ׳ ed. Bub. (ed. השחיל עצמו) he slipped and squeezed himself into the cave.—Part. pass. צָפוּף; f. צְפוּפָה; pl. צְפוּפִים, צְפוּפִין. Ab. V, 5 עומדים צ׳ … רוחים when they stood (in the Temple), they were pressed together, but when they prostrated themselves, they had room enough; Lev. R. s. 10; Kob. R. to I, 7. Y’lamd. to Deut. V, 6, quot. in Ar. ראו היאך עומדין המלאכים צ׳ וכ׳ see, how the angels stand before me crowded and trembling.
- to be pressed together, huddle. Yalk. Ex. 283 (ref. to Ex. XIX, 17 ויתיצבו נִצְפְּפוּ מלמד וכ׳ ‘they placed themselves’, they huddled together, which intimates that they were afraid &c.; Mekh. Yithro, Baḥodesh, s. 3 נכפפו וכ׳ (corr. acc.; the entire paragraph is to be emended after Yalk.).—[Hif. הֵיצֵף, הֵיצֵיף, v. צוּף.] e.g. Exodus 19:17
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 H6850 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֲצַפְצֵ֔ף | Verb, Pilpel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Isaiah 38:14 | 1 |
| הַֽ/מְצַפְצְפִ֖ים | Verb, Pilpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 8:19 | 1 |
| וּ/מְצַפְצֵֽף | Verb, Pilpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 10:14 | 1 |
| תְּצַפְצֵֽף | Verb, Pilpel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Isaiah 29:4 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
