צִרְעָה
hornets
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6880 appears — 3 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Joshua 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.
צרעה — transliterated tsirʻâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “hornets.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. More than a third of its appearances fall in Exodus. Debuting at Exodus 23:28, it then recurs through the corpus. Related forms include צרע, צרעת and צרועה. 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 H6880 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 1 verse 33%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 33%
- Joshua 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 67%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Hornet 2×
- American Standard Version: Hornet 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hornet 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hornet 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6880 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6880 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6880 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6880 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- hornets
Word origin
צִרְעָה n.f.coll. hornets (? as wounding, prostrating; NH = BH)
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צרע (tsâraʻ) (H6879) — to be leprous.
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.
צִרְעָה
- preced. wds.) [plague,] hornet (collect. noun). Y. Sabb. XIV, beg. 14ᵃ מותר להרוג את הצ׳ וכ׳ you may kill hornets on the Sabbath (because they are dangerous to life). Ib.; Bab. Sabb. 121ᵇ צ׳ שבנינוה, v. נִינְוֵה. Midr. Till. to Ps. LXXVIII, 45 וכן הצ׳ בימי וכ׳ the same was the case with the plague of hornets in Joshua’s days; Yalk. Sam. 102; a. e.—[Yalk. Lev. 537 יכול אף הצ׳, read: הצִיפָּה.]—Pl. צִרְעִים, צִרְעִין, צִרְעוֹת. Yalk. Sam. l. c. והיו שתי צ׳ קורעות וכ׳ two hornets split the stem &c.; Tanḥ. Mishp. 18 צִרְעָיוֹת; ed. Bub. 12 צרעות. Makhsh. VI, 4 דבש צ׳ hornets’ honey. Sot. 36ᵃ שתי צ׳ הואי וכ׳ there were two plagues of hornets, one in Moses’ days, and one in Joshua’s; a. e.
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 2 distinct written forms H6880 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/צִּרְעָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 7:20 | 2 |
| הַ/צִּרְעָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 23:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6880, 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
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 5 — not the complete family. 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 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.
