שָׂטַן
to oppose
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”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H7853 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, שטן (sâṭan) means “to oppose.” The word gravitates to Psalms (83%), then Zechariah. It appears 6 verses across 2 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. First canonically at Psalms 38:20, it enters the text early. It shares a root with שטן and שטנה. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7853 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 83%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 17%
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: Adversaries 1×, Are adversaries 1×, Are mine adversaries 1×
- American Standard Version: Are adversaries 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Accuse him 1×, Accusers 1×, Attack me 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Accusers 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7853 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7853 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7853 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7853 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.
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 be or act as an adversary, resist, oppose
Word origin
[ שָׂטַן ] vb. denom. be or act as adversary
— 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.
סְטַן
- Targ. Y. Num. XXII, 22 למִשְׂטַן (O. לשָׂטָן; ed. Berl. לסָטָן). Ib. 32 למִישְׂטַן (O. ed. Vien. למִסְטַן; ed. Berl. לסָטָן). Targ. Ps. XXXVIII, 21 סָטְנַן Levita (ed. Af.). Ib. CIX, 4 סְטַנוּ (Ms. שַׂטְנוּ); a. e.
- 1. same. Ib. XXXVIII, 21, v. supra.—2) (denom. of same. סָטָן) to mislead. Yoma 20ᵃ לית ליה רשותא לאַסְטוּנֵי (not לאיס׳) has no permission to seduce to sin.
שָׂטַן
- , v. סָטַן
- 1. to accuse, v. סָטַן.
- 2. to lead astroy; Part. מַשִׂטִין seducer. Tanḥ. Vayera 22.
שְׂטַן
- , v. סְטַן
שָׂטָן
- preced.) hostile being, hinderer, disturber; accuser, Satan. Sifré Deut. 218 (ref. to Deut. XXI, 10 sq., a. 18 sq.) אביו של זה … והכניס ש׳ לתוך ביתו וכ׳ this man’s father loved a fair captive, and brought the disturber into his house, and his son became rebellious. Y. Sabb. V, 5ᵇ top, v. קִטְיֵג. Ber. 19ᵃ, a. e. אל יפתח אדם פיו לש׳ man must not open his mouth for Satan, i.e. invite misfortune by ominous words. Sabb. 89ᵃ בשעה שירד … בא ש׳ וכ׳ when Moses had gone down from the presence of the Lord, Satan came, and said &c. Ib. בא ש׳ ועירבב וכ׳ Satan came (to the Israelites), and brought confusion into the world. R. Hash. 16ᵇ, v. עִרְבֵּב. Yalk. Dan. 1063 ביום … נולד שְׂטָנוֹ דריוש on the day that Nebuchadnezzar entered the Temple … his adversary Darius was born. Tanḥ. Vayishl. 8 מפני שהש׳ מזדווג לו because Satan joins him (the wicked on his road); Yalk. Ps. 843 מפני שמלאכי ש׳ מלוין אותו because Satan’s messengers escort him; a. fr.—בכור ש׳, v. בְּכוֹר.—Pl. שְׂטָנִים. Deut. R. s. 11, v. סַמָּאֵל. Cant. R. to I, 1 שלשה ש׳ נזדווגו לו three hindrances befell him (Solomon, I Kings XI, 14; 23; 25); a. e. e.g. Deuteronomy 21:10
שָׂטָן ²
- Targ. I Kings V, 18; a. fr., v. סְטַן II.—Kidd. 30ᵃ; Succ. 38ᵃ Ms. M. 2 (ed. ס׳), v. גִּיר III. Kidd. 81ᵃ אידמי ליה ש׳ כאיתתא Satan (temptation) appeared to him as a woman. Ib. הוה רגיל … גירא בעיניה דש׳ used to say every day, I challenge Satan, v. גִּיר III. Sabb. 32ᵃ ש׳ בתרי אומי וכ׳ Satan has no power over two persons of different nationalities (on the same boat &c.); a. e.—V. סְטַן II.—Pl. שִׂטְנֵי, שׂוֹטְנֵי, v. סְטַן II.
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 6 distinct written forms H7853 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִ֝שְׂטְנ֗וּ/נִי | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Psalms 38:20 | 1 |
| יִשְׂטְנ֗וּ/נִי | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Psalms 109:4 | 1 |
| לְ/שִׂטְנֽ/וֹ | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Zechariah 3:1 | 1 |
| שֹׂ֭טְנַ/י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 109:20 | 1 |
| שֹׂטְנֵ֪י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 71:13 | 1 |
| שׂוֹטְנַ֣/י | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 109:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7853, 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 3 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.
