שֶׁ֫סַע
cleft
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8157 appears — 4 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.
Leviticus 3 verses
- Leviticus 11:3 שֶׁ֨סַע֙ n c ms cs Whatever parts the hoof, and is cloven-footed, and chews the cud among the animals, that you may eat.
- Leviticus 11:7 שֶׁ֨סַע֙ n c ms cs The pig, because he has a split hoof, and is cloven-footed, but doesn't chew the cud, he is unclean to you.
- Leviticus 11:26 שֹׁסַ֗עַת Qal ptcp.act fs "'Every animal which parts the hoof, and is not cloven-footed, nor chews the cud, is unclean to you. Everyone who touches them shall be unclean.
Deuteronomy 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 noun שסע centers on the idea of “cleft.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Leviticus dominates its distribution — 3 of 4 verses. Debuting at Leviticus 11:3, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H8157 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 3 verses 75%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 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: Cleaveth 1×, Is not clovenfooted 1×
- American Standard Version: Cloven 1×, Is not clovenfooted 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Split 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cleft of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8157 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8157 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8157 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H8157 across 4 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.
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.
- cleft, cloven, split
Word origin
n.[m.] cleft;—as acc. cogn. c. [שָׁסַע], q.v.; abs. Lv 11:26, cstr. v 3, 7 Dt 14:6.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שסע (shâçaʻ) (H8156) — to split.
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.
שָׁסַע
- (b. h.) to rend, split. —Part. pass. שָׁסוּעַ; pl. שְׁסוּעִים, שְׁסוּעִין cloven-footed. Yalk. Lev. 537 (ref. to Lev. XI, 26) לש׳ מנין whence do we learn that the laws of uncleanness apply to the cloven-footed animals?; לשאין ש׳ מנין that it applies to those not cloven-footed?; Sifra Sh’mini, ch. V, Par. 4 שיסועים (corr. acc.). e.g. Leviticus 11:26
- same. Zeb. VI, 5 שי׳ ולא וכ׳ he rent (the sacrificial bird), but did not sever it entirely. Tosef. ib. VII, 10 היה מְשַׁסְּעוֹ ביד וכ׳ he rent it with his hand, but not with a knife; a. e.—Part. pass. מְשׁוּסָּע cloven-footed. Sifra l. c. מפריס ומש׳, v. פָּרַס; Yalk. l. c. ומשסע (corr. acc.).
שְׁסַע
- , Pa. שַׁסַּע same. Targ. Lam. III, 11 (h. text פשח).
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 2 distinct written forms H8157 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| שֶׁ֨סַע֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Leviticus 11:3 | 3 |
| שֹׁסַ֗עַת | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:26 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
