קְלָלָה
curse
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
- 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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H7045 appears in the Book of Zechariah — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Zechariah
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, קללה (qᵉlâlâh) means “curse.” Scripture first uses it in Genesis 27:12. It turns up in 33 verses across 12 books, a moderately common footprint. The word gravitates to Deuteronomy (33%), then Jeremiah and Genesis. It shares a root with קלל, קל and קלל. Dig into 33-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7045 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 →
- 33
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 33 distinct verses.
- 12 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 12 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,064
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,064 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 33 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 11 verses 33%
- Jeremiah 9 verses 27%
- Genesis 2 verses 6%
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 33 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 45%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 13 verses · 39%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 15%
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: Curse 21×, Cursing 3×
- American Standard Version: Curse 19×, All these curses 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Curse 15×, Cursing 6×, Curses 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Curse 15×, Curses 6×, Cursing 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7045 across 33 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H7045 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7045 across 32 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7045 across 28 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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.
- curse, vilification, execration
Word origin
n.f. curse;—abs. ק׳ Gn 27:12 +; cstr. קִלְלַת Ju 9:57 +; sf. קִלְלָֽתְךָ Gn 27:13, קִלְלָתוֹ 2 S 16:12 (van d. H. Kt קללתי, so We Dr Löhr); pl. קְלָלוֹת Dt 28:15, 45;—curse, Gn 27:12, 13 (J); often opp. בְּרָכָה, Dt 11:26, 28; 23:6 = Ne 13:2, + 8 times Dt., Jos 8:34 (D), Ju 9:57 ψ 109:17, 18 Pr 27:14; קִלְלַת חִנָּם Pr 26:2 a groundless curse, cf. 2 S 16:12; קְלָלָה נִמְרֶצֶת 1 K 2:8 a grievous curse; = a formula of cursing Je 29:22; = object of curse, קִלְלַת אֱלֹהִים תָּלוּי Dt 21:23, שַׁמָּה וּקְלָלָה 2 K 22:19, cf. Je 24:9; 25:18 + 6 times Je, Zc 8:13.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קלל (qâlal) (H7043) — to be light.
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.
קְלָלָה
- preced.) dishonor; curse. B. Mets. 75ᵇ גורם ק׳ לעצמו brings dishonor upon himself (people believing him to be dishonest). Meg. 15ᵃ, a. e. אל תהי קִלְלַת הדיוט וכ׳ let not the curse of a common man be a slight thing in thy eyes. Ib. 28ᵃ לא עלתה … קללת חבירי the thought of my neighbor’s curse never went to bed with me (v. צְעַר). Sot. 11ᵃ תולה קִלְלָתוֹ וכ׳, v. קָלַל. Yoma 54ᵇ חללו … וקִלְלָתָן ק׳ וכ׳ those whose blessing is blessing, and whose curse is curse (whose blessings and curses are efficacious) are engaged in such things!—Y. Snh. VII, 25ᵃ bot. קיללת השם (usu. ברכת) blasphemy. Ib. מהו לקרוע על קיללת הגוי how about rending one’s garments on hearing blasphemy by a gentile?; a. fr.—Pl. קְלָלוֹת. Meg. 31ᵇ ק׳ שבתורת כהנים the curses in Leviticus (XXVI, 14-43); שבמשנה תורה the curses in Deuteronomy (XXVIII, 15-68). Ib. שתכלה השנה וקִלְלוֹתֶיהָ that the year and its curses my end together. Erub. 100ᵇ עשר ק׳ וכ׳ Eve was cursed with ten curses; a. fr.
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 26 distinct written forms H7045 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7045, 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. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 27 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 33 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
- Genesis 27:12
- Deuteronomy 11:26
- Judges 9:57
- 2 Samuel 16:12
- 1 Kings 2:8
- 2 Kings 22:19
- Proverbs 26:2
- Jeremiah 24:9
- Zechariah 8:13
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.
