צָֽרְפַת
Zarephath
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Zarephath’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H6886 appears in the Book of 1 Kings — 2 distinct verses. 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.
1 Kings
- 1 Kings 17:9 צָרְפַ֨תָ/ה֙ n Proper + sfx dem Arise, get you to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and dwell there: behold, I have commanded a widow there to sustain you.
- 1 Kings 17:10 צָרְפַ֗תָ/ה n Proper + sfx dem So he arose and went to Zarephath; and when he came to the gate of the city, behold, a widow was there gathering sticks: and he called to her, and said, Please get me a little water in a vessel, that I may drink.
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, צרפת (Tsârᵉphath) means “Zarephath.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to 1 Kings (67%), then Obadiah. It first appears in 1 Kings 17:9. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6886 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.
- #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 →
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: Zarephath 2×
- American Standard Version: Shall possess even unto zarephath 1×, Thee to zarephath 1×, Zarephath 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Zarephath 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Zarephath 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6886 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 H6886 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6886 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6886 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Zarephath = "refinery"
- a city on the coast south of Sidon and the residence of Elijah during the last part of the drought; modern 'Sura-fend'
Word origin
n.pr.loc. Σαρεπτα: on coast S. of Sidon (? smelting-place; on strange form cf. LagBN 84; Assyrian Ṣariptu DlPa 284 COT 1 K 17, 9; Egyptian Ḏa-ï̥ra-pu-ti̥ WMMAs. u. Eur. 184);—צ׳ Ob 20; צָֽרְפָ֫תָה 1 K 17:9, 10 (so Gi; -פַ֫תָה van d. H. Baer); mod. Ṣarfend RobBR ii. 474 ff. PietschmPhön. 58 f..
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צרף (tsâraph) (H6884) — to refine.
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.
צָרְפַת
- (b. h.) pr. n. pl. Zarephath (Sarepta), near Sidon. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXXIII. [In later Hebrew literature צ׳ is a name for France; with ref. to Ob. I, 20.] e.g. Obadiah 1:20
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 3 distinct written forms H6886 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| צָ֣רְפַ֔ת | Noun, Proper | Obadiah 1:20 | 1 |
| צָרְפַ֗תָ/ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 17:10 | 1 |
| צָרְפַ֨תָ/ה֙ | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 17:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6886, 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. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Zarephath). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Smelting-shop, "a workshop for the refining and smelting of metals", a small Phoenician town, now Surafend, about a mile from the coast, almost midway on the road between Tyre and Sidon. Here Elijah sojourned with a poor widow during the "great famine," when the "heaven was shut up three years and six months" (Luke 4:26; 1 Kings 17:10). It is called Sarepta in the New Testament (Luke 4:26).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(smelting place), the residence of the prophet Elijah during the latter part of the drought. (1 Kings 17:9,10) It was near to, or dependent on, Zidon. It is represented by the modern village of Sura-fend . Of the old town considerable indications remain. One group of foundations is on a headland called Ain el-Kanatarah ; but the chief remains are south of this, and extend for a mile or more, with many fragments of columns, slabs and other architectural features. In the New Testament Zarephath appears under the Greek form of Sarepta. (Luke 4:26)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
ambush of the mouth
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
