קָאַת
unclean bird
‘unclean bird’ is one of 3 main senses 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6893 appears — 5 distinct verses across 5 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.
Leviticus 1 verse
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Zephaniah 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.
קאת — transliterated qâʼath — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “unclean bird.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Debuting at Leviticus 11:18, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 3 senses. Related forms include קוא and קא. 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 H6893 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 1 verse 20%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 20%
- Psalms 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 40%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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: Pelican 3×
- American Standard Version: Pelican 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Desert owl 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pelican 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6893 across 5 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6893 across 5 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6893 across 5 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 H6893 across 5 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 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 ceremonially unclean bird
- perhaps pelican or cormorant
- perhaps an extinct bird, exact meaning unknown
Word origin
n.[f.] a bird, usually pelican (cf. 𝔊 Lv Dt ψ, 𝔙 ψ (der. by Thes from [קוא], קיא (v. Köii. 1, 173, and, on ת, Ges§ 80 g), as throwing up food from its crop for its young); but sea-fowl improb. in ψ Is; NH קָאָת, 𝔗 קָאתָא id.);—abs. הַקָּאָת Lv 11:18 = Dt 14:17, as unclean; קָאַת (van d. H. Gi; Baer קָאָת) Is 34:11; Zp 2:14, as inhabiting ruins; cstr. קְאַת מִדְבָּר ψ 102:7, sim. of loneliness.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קוא (qôwʼ) (H6958) — to vomit.
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.
קָאָת
- pelican. Y. Sabb. II, beg. 4ᶜ; Ḥull. 63ᵃ, a. e., v. קִיק. M. Kat. 25ᵇ, v. כָּפַל.—Pl. קָאוֹת. Tosef. Ter. X, 2 (Var. קיאות).
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 H6893 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/קָּאָ֖ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:18 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/קָּאָ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 14:17 | 1 |
| לִ/קְאַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 102:6 | 1 |
| קָאַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 34:11 | 1 |
| קָאַת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Zephaniah 2:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6893, 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
Compare all same-root words → 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 5 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.
