שָׂטָה
to turn aside
also: go aside, turn, decline 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
- 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”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Jussive
- A third- or second-person volitional form expressing wish or command (“let him write”).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7847 appears in the Book of Numbers — 4 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.
Numbers
- Numbers 5:12 תִשְׂטֶ֣ה Qal impf 3fs "Speak to the children of Israel, and tell them: If any man's wife goes astray, and is unfaithful to him,
- Numbers 5:19 שָׂטִ֛ית Qal pf 2fs The priest shall cause her to swear, and shall tell the woman, 'If no man has lain with you, and if you haven't gone aside to uncleanness, being under your husband, be free from this water of bitterness that brings a curse.
- Numbers 5:20 שָׂטִ֛ית Qal pf 2fs But if you have gone astray, being under your husband, and if you are defiled, and some man has lain with you besides your husband:'
- Numbers 5:29 תִּשְׂטֶ֥ה Qal impf 3fs "This is the law of jealousy, when a wife, being under her husband, goes astray, and is defiled;
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.
“to turn aside” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb שטה (sâṭâh). It clusters heavily in Numbers, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. With 6 verses in 2 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at Numbers 5:12, it enters the text early. Beyond “to turn aside” it also covers “go aside”, “turn”, and “decline” — see its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7847 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 33%
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: Decline 1×, Go aside 1×, Goeth aside 1×
- American Standard Version: Decline 1×, Go aside 1×, Goeth aside 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Goes astray 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Turn aside 2×, Turns aside 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7847 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7847 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7847 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7847 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 1 sense the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Pf. 2 fs. שָׂטִית Nu 5:19, 20; Impf. 3 fs. תִּשְׂטֶה v 12, 29, juss. 3 ms. יֵשְׂטְ Pr 7:25; Imv. ms. שְׂטֵה 4:15;—turn aside, of unfaithful wife Nu 5:12 (abs.), + תַּחַת אִישׁ, i.e. while married, v 19 (+ טֻמְאָה adv. acc.), v 20, 29 (all P); of youth, from (מֵעַל) way of evil woman Pr 4:15, toward (אֶל) her ways 7:25. e.g. Numbers 5:19
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. turn aside (Aramaic סְטָא, ܣܛܳܐ id.; שְׂטָא stray; Ethiopic ሠጠየ iii. 1 be seduced, etc.; cf. DrJPhil. xi (1882), 205);—
— 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.
שִׁטָּא
- , v. sub שִׁיטּ׳.
שָׂטָה
- , v. שׂטי
שָׁטָה
- , v. שׁטי
שׂטי
- , v. סָטָה
שטי
- (cmp. סָטָה) [to go astray,] to be demented, foolish. V. שׁוֹטֶה.
- , Nithpa. נִשְׁתַּטֶּה
- 1. to become demented. Tosef. B. Kam. IV, 4 שנִישְׁטוּ בעלין ed. Zuck. (Var. שנִשְׁתַּטּוּ) whose owner became insane; B. Kam. 39ᵇ. Yeb. XIV, 1 נִשְׁתַּטֵּית וכ׳ if the wife becomes insane, he cannot divorce her; נ׳ וכ׳ if he becomes insane, he can never divorce her; a. fr.
- 2. to be mad; to rage, be impassioned. Num. R. s. 2023 היה נִשְׁטֶה אחריה וכ׳ he was mad with passion for her, as we read (Hos. IV, 11) &c.; Tanḥ. Balak 18 היו משטתה וכ׳ (read: היה מִשְׁתַּטֶּה; ed. Bub. 25 נשטה). Ib. והוא נ׳ וכ׳ and he in his rage for her slaughtered it to Baal Peor; Num. R. l. c. Tosef. Nidd. V, 17 עד מתי אתם נִשְׁטִין וכ׳ how long will you rage? cry to him that created the sea. Tanḥ. Vayera 22 והזקן הוא ה׳ וכ׳ and that old man (Abraham) has run mad, and he is going to slay thee. Yalk. Sam. 131 והיתה צועקת ומִשְׁתַּטָּה … ומִשְׁתַּטֶּה מבחוץ and she screamed and raged within, and David screamed and raged without; Midr. Till. to Ps. XXXIV והיו צועקות שתיהן ומַשְׁטוֹת … ומַשְׁטֶה בחוץ and both of them (mother and daughter) screamed and raged &c. Yalk. Ps. 846 [read:] מכאן שמשאדם רואה בנים כאילו הוא משתטה from this we learn that, when a man lives to have children, he acts like a fool (in playing with them). e.g. Hosea 4:11
- 1. same, v. supra.
- 2. (with ב) to fool, jest. Yeb. 106ᵃ; B. Kam. 116ᵃ אמר ליה משטה אני בך he may say, I was only jesting with thee. B. Bath. 175ᵃ אין אדם משטה בשעת מיתה nobody jests in his dying hour (therefore a dying man’s admission of indebtedness does not require the usual formalities to be binding).
שִׁטִּים
- v. שִׁיטָּה.
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 H7847 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שָׂטִ֛ית | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 2nd Person, Feminine, Singular | Numbers 5:19 | 2 |
| יֵ֣שְׂטְ | Verb, Qal, Jussive, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 7:25 | 1 |
| שְׂטֵ֖ה | Verb, Qal, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 4:15 | 1 |
| תִשְׂטֶ֣ה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Numbers 5:12 | 1 |
| תִּשְׂטֶ֥ה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Numbers 5:29 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
