קָטַל
to slay
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (67%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6991 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Job 2 verses
Psalms 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.
The Hebrew verb קטל centers on the idea of “to slay.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Job dominates its distribution — 2 of 3 verses. Debuting at Job 13:15, it then recurs through the corpus. Sharing its root, it stands alongside קטל and קטל. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6991 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: He slay 1×, Killeth 1×, Surely thou wilt slay 1×
- American Standard Version: He killeth 1×, He will slay 1×, Surely thou wilt slay 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He slay me 1×, Kill 1×, You would slay 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He kills 1×, He kills me 1×, You would kill 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6991 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6991 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6991 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6991 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Qal) to slay, kill
Word origin
[ קָטַל ] vb. slay (poet. and late)
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
קְטַל
- 1. to cut. Snh. 74ᵇ if a gentile says to a Jew, קְטוֹל אספסתא וכ׳ cut grass on the Sabbath and throw it to the cattle, or I shall kill thee, לִיקְטִיל ולא לִיקְטְלֵיה let him cut, that he (the gentile) may not kill him; שדי לנהרא ליקטליה ולא ליקטול but if he says to him, (cut grass and) throw it into the river, let him (the gentile) kill him, but he must not cut, because the gentile’s intention is merely to make him commit a sin; Yeb. 121ᵇ. Sabb. 95ᵃ רבך קָטֵיל … הוה thy teacher must have been a cutter of reeds in the marsh (an ignorant man); Snh. 33ᵃ אטו אנן קַטְלֵי וכ׳ are we reed-cutters?; a. e.
- 2. to kill. Targ. Gen. V, 8. Targ. Ex. IV, 23, sq.; a. fr.—Part. pass. קְטִיל, קְטִילָא; f. קְטִילָא; pl. קְטִילִין, קְטִילַיָּא; קְטִילָן. Targ. II Sam. XXIII, 8. Targ. Prov. VII, 26; a. fr.—Cant. R. to III, 4 אריא קטילא קְטִילַת thou hast killed a dead lion; Snh. 96ᵇ עמא ק׳ קַטְלַת thou hast killed a dead people, v. טְחַן. Ib. 74ᵃ אמר … זיל קַטְלֵיה … ואי לא קַטְלִינָא לן the governor of my place told me, go and kill that man, or I shall kill thee; א"ל לִיקְטְלוּךְ ולא תִיקְטוֹל וכ׳ said he (Raba) to him, let them kill thee, but do thou not kill; who tells thee that thy blood is redder &c.? Cant. R. to IV, 1 (expl. טרף, Gen. VIII, 11) קטיל וכ׳ killed, as we read (Gen. XXXVII, 33) ṭarof &c.; אמר לה אילו לא קְטַלְתִּינֵיה וכ׳ he (Noah) said to her (the dove), hadst thou not killed it, it would have become a big tree; Lev. R. s. 31 אילו לא קְטַלְתֵּיה; Yalk. Gen. 59; (Gen. R. s. 33 אילו שבקתה); a. fr. e.g. Genesis 8:11
- same, to Kill. Targ. Ex. XVII, 3. Targ. II Kings XVII, 26; a. fr.—Y. Taan. IV, 69ᵃ והוון רומים … ומְקַטְּלִין לון the Romans came and massacred them (the inhabitants); a. e.
- to be killed, put to death. Targ. Ex. XXI, 15. Targ. Prov. XXII, 13; a. fr.—Keth. 35ᵇ אע"ג דמִיקְּטִיל משלם although he is to be put to death, he must pay damages; a. e.
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 H6991 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִ֭קְטְלֵ/נִי | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 13:15 | 1 |
| יִֽקְטָל | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 24:14 | 1 |
| תִּקְטֹ֖ל | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 139:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6991, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 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.
