אָצַר
to store up
also: save, lay up fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
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”). Here: ‘store up treasure’
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- 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
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 2 times (40%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 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 H686 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.
2 Kings 1 verse
Nehemiah 1 verse
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 23:18 יֵֽאָצֵ֖ר Niphal impf 3ms Her merchandise and her hire shall be holiness to Yahweh: it shall not be treasured nor laid up; for her merchandise shall be for those who dwell before Yahweh, to eat sufficiently, and for durable clothing.
- Isaiah 39:6 אָצְר֧וּ Qal pf 3cp Behold, the days are coming, when all that is in your house, and that which your fathers have laid up in store until this day, shall be carried to Babylon: nothing shall be left, says Yahweh.
Amos 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.
אצר — transliterated ʼâtsar — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to store up.” It occurs a mere 5 verses across Scripture. More than a third of its appearances fall in Isaiah. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Kings 20:17. The verb spans 3 stems, from Qal to Niphal. 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 H686 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: Have laid up in store 2×
- American Standard Version: Have laid up in store 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Have stored up 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Have stored up 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H686 across 5 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 H686 across 5 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 H686 across 5 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 H686 across 6 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.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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 3 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.
Qal
- store up treasure
Niphal
- . be stored up, of the merchandise of Tyre
Hiphil
- . and I appointed treasurer
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
[ אָצַר ] vb. lay up, store up
— 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.
אָצַר
- to lock up, hoard, gather; cmp. גָּנַז. B. Bath. 90ᵇ אוֹצְרֵי פירות those who store up fruit (for speculation). Ib. אין אוֹצְרִין וכ׳; Tosef. Ab. Zar. IV (V), 1 (אצר a. עצר used promiscuously) you must not hoard up (for speculation) such things as are necessaries of life; [correct אין א׳ דברים שיש … כגון יינות שמנים וסלתות ופירות]. Ib. לֶאֱצוֹר (Tosef. לאַצֵּר Pi.). Ib. לא יְאַצֵּר Pi. (Tosef. ולא יַעֲצוֹר, read לא; Var. לא יַאֲצִיר). Gen. R. s. 45 end (play on נבוכדרא̇צ̇ר̇) שאֲצָרָן וכ׳ he locked them up in the desert &c.—Y. Dem. VI, end, 26ᵃ; Tosef. ib. VI, 4; Ab. Zar. 71ᵃ אוֹצֵר (עוֹצֵר) government’s store-collector, commissary (apothecarius), or read אוֹצָר q. v.
- , v. supra.
אֲצַר I
- *Targ. O. Gen. XLI, 35 וייצרון, Var. ויוצרון, ויצרון). B. Bath. 90ᵇ פוק אצר לי וכ׳ (prob. אַצַּר Pa.) go out and buy up for me for storage &c.
- to be stored up. Targ. Is. XXIII, 18.
אַצָּר
- w. (preced.) אַצַּר פירי speculator in provision. Yoma 83ᵃ; B. Bath. 90ᵇ
אֲצַר II
- (preced.) contraction(h.. Bekh. 21ᵇ א׳ חיותא contraction of the womb (and consequent destruction of the fœtus).
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 H686 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אָצְר֧וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | 2 Kings 20:17 | 2 |
| הָ/אֽוֹצְרִ֛ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Amos 3:10 | 1 |
| וָ/אוֹצְרָ֣/ה | Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Nehemiah 13:13 | 1 |
| יֵֽאָצֵ֖ר | Verb, Niphal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 23:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H686, 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 4 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.
