קִדְרוֹן
Kidron
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Kidron’ 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 H6939 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 2:37 קִדְר֔וֹן n Proper For on the day you go out, and pass over the brook Kidron, know you for certain that you shall surely die: your blood shall be on your own head.
- 1 Kings 15:13 קִדְרֽוֹן n Proper Also Maacah his mother he removed from being queen, because she had made an abominable image for an Asherah; and Asa cut down her image, and burnt it at the brook Kidron.
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.
קדרון — transliterated Qidrôwn — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Kidron.” It first appears in 2 Samuel 15:23. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 10 verses — uncommon. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in 2 Kings. 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 H6939 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 10 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Kings 3 verses 30%
- 2 Chronicles 3 verses 30%
- 1 Kings 2 verses 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 10 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 7 verses · 70%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 30%
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: Kidron 11×
- American Standard Version: Kidron 11×
- Berean Standard Bible: Kidron 9×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Kidron 10×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6939 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6939 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6939 across 11 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6939 across 10 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.
- Kidron = "dark"
- a stream east of Jerusalem
Word origin
n.pr. of wady just E. of Jerusalem (Thes. turbidus);—נַחַל ק׳ 2 S 15:23; 1 K 2:37; usually as place for refuse 1 K 15:13 = 2 Ch 15:16; 2 K 23:6(×2), 12; 2 Ch 29:16; 30:14; Je 31:40; so שַׁדְמוֹת ק׳ 2 K 23:4; Κεδρων; cf. Rob Phys. Geogr. 87 ff. BuhlGeogr. 93 BdPal. 3 (1898), 94.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קדר (qâdar) (H6937) — to mourn.
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.
קִדְרוֹן
- (b. h.) pr. n., נחל ק׳ Torrent (or Brook) of Kidron, near Jerusalem. Y. Taan. III, 67ᵃ top, a. e., v. קִשְׁקֵשׁ I.
קַדְרוֹן
- Targ. Y. Gen. VIII, 4, v. קַרְדּוּ I
קדרון
- , Lam. R. to I, 16 ק׳ גלוסקאן some ed., read: קֶרֶן.—Yalk. Lev. 665 חמי ק׳, read: קְדָלִין.
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 H6939 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| קִדְר֔וֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 2:37 | 4 |
| קִדְרֽוֹן | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 15:13 | 4 |
| קִדְר֖וֹן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 29:16 | 2 |
| קִדְר֜וֹן | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 31:40 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6939, 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 6 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Kidron). 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
= Kedron = Cedron, turbid, the winter torrent which flows through the Valley of Jehoshaphat, on the eastern side of Jerusalem, between the city and the Mount of Olives. This valley is known in Scripture only by the name "the brook Kidron." David crossed this brook bare-foot and weeping, when fleeing from Absalom (2 Sam. 15:23, 30), and it was frequently crossed by our Lord in his journeyings to and fro (John 18:1). Here Asa burned the obscene idols of his mother (1 Kings 15:13), and here Athaliah was executed (2 Kings 11:16). It afterwards became the receptacle for all manner of impurities (2 Chr. 29:16; 30:14); and in the time of Josiah this valley was the common cemetery of the city (2 Kings 23:6; comp. Jer. 26:23).
Through this mountain ravine no water runs, except after heavy rains in the mountains round about Jerusalem. Its length from its head to en-Rogel is 2 3/4 miles. Its precipitous, rocky banks are filled with ancient tombs, especially the left bank opposite the temple area. The greatest desire of the Jews is to be buried there, from the idea that the Kidron is the "valley of Jehoshaphat" mentioned in Joel 3:2.
Below en-Rogel the Kidron has no historical or sacred interest. It runs in a winding course through the wilderness of Judea to the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. Its whole length, in a straight line, is only some 20 miles, but in this space its descent is about 3,912 feet. (See KEDRON.)
Recent excavations have brought to light the fact that the old bed of the Kidron is about 40 feet lower than its present bed, and about 70 feet nearer the sanctuary wall.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
obscure; making black or sad
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 10 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 10 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.
