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שַׁעֲרוּרָה

horrible thing

H8186 Strong's Hebrew
shaʻărûwrâh Transliteration
/shah-ar-oo-raw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 5 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

שערורה (shaʻărûwrâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “horrible thing.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Jeremiah dominates its distribution — 3 of 4 verses. It first appears in Jeremiah 5:30. Related forms include שער, שער and שער. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
horrible thing
Modern gloss
horrible thing
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H8186 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.
Jeremiah 5:30
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Jeremiah 5:30.
Hosea 6:10
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Hosea 6:10.
#3,337
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 4 · 100%

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.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Horrible thing 4×
  • American Standard Version: Horrible thing 4×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Horrible thing 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Horrible thing 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H8186 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Horrible thing” 4×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H8186 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Horrible thing” 4×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H8186 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Horrible thing” 2×

Plus 2 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 H8186 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Horrible thing” 2×

Plus 3 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.

  1. horrible thing

Word origin

n.f. horror = horrible thing;—שַׁמָּה וְשׁ׳ Je 5:30 an astounding and horrible thing has occurred; בִּנְבִיאֵי ירושׁ׳ רָאִיתִי שׁ׳ 23:14.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from שער (shâʻar) (H8176) — to calculate.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 2439b


Forms in the corpus

The 5 distinct written forms H8186 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
וְ/שַׁ֣עֲרוּרָ֔ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Jeremiah 5:30 1
שַֽׁעֲרֻרִת֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Jeremiah 18:13 1
שַׁעֲרֽוּרִיָּ֑ה Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Hosea 6:10 1
שַׁעֲרוּרָ֗ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Jeremiah 23:14 1
שעריריה Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Hosea 6:10 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8186, 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 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.