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קֹטֶב

destruction

H6987 Strong's Hebrew
qôṭeb Transliteration
/ko'-teb/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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, קטב (qôṭeb) means “destruction.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Hosea (100%). Found nowhere else but Hosea 13:14. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
destruction
Modern gloss
destruction
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H6987 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Hosea 13:14
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Hosea 13:14.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 100%

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 1 distinct verse.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Be thy destruction 1×
  • American Standard Version: Destruction 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Is your sting 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Destruction 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H6987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Be thy destruction” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H6987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Destruction” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H6987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Is your sting” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H6987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Destruction” 1×

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.

  1. destruction

Word origin

[קֹ֫טֶב] n.m. Dt 32:24 destruction;—of pestilence, abs. ק׳ Dt 32:24 (‖ רֶשֶׁף), ψ 91:6 (‖ דֶּבֶר), so sf. (of She’ôl) קָֽטָבְךָ (Ges§ 93 q) Ho 13:14 (‖ of מָוֶת, דְּבָרֶיךָ); more gen., שַׂעַר קָ֑טֶב Is 28:2.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from קטב (qeṭeb) (H6986) — destruction.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 2007a


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.

קטב

  • , Targ. Y. II, Ex. XXX, 34, v. קְטַף II

קְטַב

  • to cut, split. Targ. Y. Deut. XIX, 5 Ar. (ed. קטע).

קֶטֶב

  • v. preced.) [cutting down,] pestilence; ק׳ or ק׳ מרירי [bitter, deadly disease], Ḳeṭeb (M’riri), name of a demon. Lam. R. to I, 3 ביומן דעקא … שבהם ק׳ מ׳ מצוי in the days of anguish, from the seventeenth of Tammuz to the ninth of Ab, during which Ḳ. M. is about. Num. R. s. 12 (ref. to Ps. XCI, 6) שד … שמו ק׳ וכ׳ it is a demon, and why is his name Ḳeṭeb? &c., v. בְּזַז, גְּזַז. Ib. ק׳ מ׳ עשוי וכ׳ Ḳ. M. is covered with peeling crusts, with hairs and with eyes; Yalk. Ps. 842; Midr. Till. to Ps. XCI. Pes. 111ᵇ חזייה להאי ק׳ מ׳ וכ׳ he said K. M. coming to his left side. e.g. Psalms 91:6

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.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

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