צֳרִי
balm
‘balm’ 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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6875 appears — 6 distinct verses across 3 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.
Genesis 2 verses
- Genesis 37:25 וּ/צְרִ֣י conj + n c ms They sat down to eat bread, and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites was coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.
- Genesis 43:11 צֳרִי֙ n c ms Their father, Israel, said to them, "If it be so now, do this. Take from the choice fruits of the land in your bags, and carry down a present for the man, a little balm, a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts, and almonds;
Jeremiah 3 verses
- Jeremiah 8:22 הַ/צֳרִי֙ ptcl inter + n c ms Is there no balm in Gilead? is there no physician there? why then isn't the health of the daughter of my people recovered?
- Jeremiah 46:11 צֳרִ֔י n c ms Go up into Gilead, and take balm, virgin daughter of Egypt: in vain do you use many medicines; there is no healing for you.
- Jeremiah 51:8 צֳרִי֙ n c ms Babylon is suddenly fallen and destroyed: wail for her; take balm for her pain, if so be she may be healed.
Ezekiel 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.
The Hebrew noun צרי centers on the idea of “balm.” The word gravitates to Jeremiah (50%), then Genesis and Ezekiel. It turns up in 6 verses across 3 books, an uncommon footprint. First canonically at Genesis 37:25, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6875 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 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 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 33%
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: Balm 5×
- American Standard Version: Balm 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Balm 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Balm 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6875 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6875 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6875 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6875 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.
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.
- a kind of balsam, balm, salve
- as merchandise
- as medicine
Word origin
(Gn 37:25) (וּ)צְרִי, צֹ֑רִי Ez 27:17 n.[m.] a kind of balsam, as merchandise Gn 37:25 (J), gift Gn 43:11 (J), medicament Je 8:22; 46:11; 51:8 (for national disaster, in fig.);—ThDyer-M’Lean in Ency. Bib.Balm think a resin, like (not necess. =) gum of mastic-tree, pistacia lentiscus (otherwise PostHastings DB).
— 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 meaning to crack [as by pressure], hence, to leak
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.
צְרֵי I
- to split, tear. Targ. II Esth. IV, 1.—Ab. Zar. 30ᵃ חזייה … דצָרֵי ואתי (Ar. צָארֵי) saw a serpent split (cross the water, cmp. צלח) and come on.—[Men. 37ᵇ דצרייה, v. צוּר II ch.].
- to burst. Ab. Zar. l. c. bot. דמְצָרֵי זיקי, v. טִילָא II.
- to be split, burst. Ib. 65ᵇ דלא נִצְטְרוּ זיקי that the wine bags should not burst. Sabb. 154ᵇ מִיצְטָרוּ זיקי the bags may burst. Yeb. 17ᵃ בנתא … אִיצְטָרוּיֵי אִיצְטָרֵי the (Canaanite) girls of that generation had their wombs cut.—[Targ. Prov. XVIII, 1; XX, 3, v. צְדֵי I.]
צְרֵי II
- v. צְרַח
צֳרִי
- preced. art.) [that which runs through cracks,] resin, balsam (v. Gen. R. s. 91, quot. s. v. בַּלְסָם).—Ker. 6ᵃ, a. fr. הצ׳ an ingredient of frankincense. Sabb. 25ᵇ; Tosef. ib. II, 3 אין מדליקין בצ׳ you must not feed the Sabbath lamp with balsam; Y. ib. II, 4ᵈ אין מדליקין צוֹרִי.
צָרֵי
- , Sabb. 90ᵇ; Ab. Zar. 75ᵃ bot. Ar., v. צוּר III h. a. ch.
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 5 distinct written forms H6875 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| צֳרִי֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 43:11 | 2 |
| הַ/צֳרִי֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 8:22 | 1 |
| וָ/צֹ֔רִי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 27:17 | 1 |
| וּ/צְרִ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 37:25 | 1 |
| צֳרִ֔י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 46:11 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6875, 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.
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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). 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 6 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.
