צָרַ֫עַת
leprosy
‘leprosy’ is one of 4 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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6883 appears in the Book of Deuteronomy — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Deuteronomy
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.
“leprosy” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun צרעת (tsâraʻath). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Leviticus. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 33 verses — moderately common. Carrying more than one sense, it rewards its full sense range. Where the King James Version says “leprosy,” newer translations reach for “mildew” (Berean Standard Bible) and “skin disease” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. See the sense tree, 33-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6883 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 →
- 33
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 33 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,023
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,023 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 33 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 27 verses 82%
- 2 Kings 4 verses 12%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 3%
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 33 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 28 verses · 85%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 12%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 3%
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: Leprosy 30×, Is a leprosy 4×
- American Standard Version: Leprosy 26×, Is leprosy 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Mildew 7×, Skin disease 6×, Is a diseased infection 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Skin disease 16×, Disease 5×, Is a skin disease 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6883 across 35 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 H6883 across 35 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6883 across 34 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 renderings that appear 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 H6883 across 39 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 the full BDB
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.
- a. human disease (as above) נֶגַע צ׳ Lv 13:2 + 8 times; without נ׳ 13:8 + 10 times e.g. Leviticus 13:2
- b. leprosy in a garment 13:47, 49, 51, 52, 59 (תּוֹרַת נֶגַע צ׳ בֶּגֶד). e.g. Leviticus 13:47
- c. in house 14:34 (נֶגַע צ׳), v 44; house or garment v 55.—Exact meaning of b. and c. dub., perhaps some fungus or mould; v. especially Di Dr-Wh Baen. e.g. Leviticus 14:34
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
n.f. leprosy;—abs. צ׳ Dt 24:8 +, צָרָ֑עַת Lv 13:2 +; cstr. צָרַ֫עַת 2 K 5:27 +; sf. צָרַעְתּוֹ 2 K 5:3, 6, 7;—leprosy 2 K 5:3, 6, 7, 27; 2 Ch 26:19; elsewhere only in laws: נֶגַע צ׳ Dt 24:8, and Lv 13, 14 (P; 29 times): תּוֹרַת הַצּ׳ 14:57; specif. of
— 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.
צָרַעַת
- preced. wds.) [plague,] leprosy. Yeb. 63ᵇ (fr. Ben Sira) אשה רעה צ׳ … מצָרַעְתּוֹ a bad wife is a plague to her husband; … let him divorce her and be cured of his plague; Snh. 100ᵇ. Lev. R. s. 16, a. fr. לקה בצ׳ was smitten with leprosy. Lev. R. s. 17 (ref. to יסגרך, I Sam. XVII, 46) לשון צ׳, v. הַסְגָּרָה. Meg. 8ᵇ מי שצרעתו תלויה בגופו he whose (seclusion on account of) leprosy depends on the condition of his body; שאין צרעתו … אלא בימים whose seclusion depends … on time; מי שצ׳ … ברפואות whose seclusion depends on his recovery; a. fr.—Pl. צְרָעוֹת. Sifra Thazr., Neg., Par. 3, ch. III בנין אב לכל הצ׳ שיהיו וכ׳ (not הצרעת, v. R. S. to Neg. IV, 3) this verse (Lev. XIII, 11) establishes the rule for all leprosies that they must be no less than the size of a bean. e.g. 1 Samuel 17:46
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 19 distinct written forms H6883 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6883, 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 → 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 33 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 33 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.
