צְרִיחַ
cellar
also: excavation, underground chamber, underground room fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (25%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 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 H6877 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Judges 2 verses
- Judges 9:46 צְרִ֔יחַ n c ms cs When all the men of the tower of Shechem heard of it, they entered into the stronghold of the house of Elberith.
- Judges 9:49 הַ/צְּרִ֔יחַ הַ/צְּרִ֖יחַ ptcl def.art + n c ms ptcl def.art + n c ms All the people likewise cut down every man his bough, and followed Abimelech, and put them to the stronghold, and set the stronghold on fire on them; so that all the men of the tower of Shechem died also, about a thousand men and women.
1 Samuel 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.
At its core, צריח (tsᵉrîyach) means “cellar.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Judges (67%), then 1 Samuel. It first appears in Judges 9:46. Ranging over 2 senses, its meaning includes “excavation”, “underground chamber”, and “underground room”. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6877 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Hold 3×
- American Standard Version: Stronghold 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Inner chamber 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Citadel 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6877 across 4 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 H6877 across 4 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 H6877 across 3 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6877 across 4 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 2 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.
- excavation, underground chamber, cellar, underground room
- meaning uncertain
Word origin
n.[m.] perhaps excavation, underground chamber;—צ׳ abs. Ju 9:49, cstr. v 46; pl. צְרִחִים 1 S 13:6;—used as hiding-places 1 S 13:6 (+ מְעָרוֹת, חֲוָחִים, סְלָעִים, בֹּרוֹת); as refuge Ju 9:46 (where connected with shrine), v 49 (Vrss stronghold; on uncertainty of meaning v. GFM).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צרח (tsârach) (H6873) — to roar.
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.
צְרַח I
- Lam. R. to I, 3 קם וצ׳ אמר ליה וכ׳ (not וצריה) he stood up and screamed (after him), saying to him &c.
- to call together; (of the bear) to growl. Targ. Prov. XXVIII, 15 (Ms. מַסְרִיחַ; h. text שוקק).
- to be called together, be summoned. Targ. O. a. Y. I Num. XXIV, 24. e.g. Numbers 24:24
צְרֵיחַ
- to scream, v. צְרַח I.
צְרִיחַ
- (preced.) Ts’riaḥ (Gathering Place, Tower). Targ. Jud. IX, 46; 49 (h. text הַצְּ׳).
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 H6877 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/צְּרִ֔יחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 9:49 | 1 |
| הַ/צְּרִ֖יחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 9:49 | 1 |
| וּ/בַ/צְּרִחִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 13:6 | 1 |
| צְרִ֔יחַ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Judges 9:46 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
