שָׂפָם
mustache
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.
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8222 appears — 5 distinct verses across 4 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 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
Ezekiel 2 verses
- Ezekiel 24:17 שָׂפָ֔ם n c ms Sigh, but not aloud, make no mourning for the dead; bind your headdress on you, and put your shoes on your feet, and don't cover your lips, and don't eat men's bread.
- Ezekiel 24:22 שָׂפָם֙ n c ms You shall do as I have done: you shall not cover your lips, nor eat the bread of men.
Micah 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.
“mustache” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun שפם (sâphâm). A scarce word — 5 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Ezekiel, which alone accounts for 40% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Leviticus 13:45. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8222 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 80%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
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: Lips 3×
- American Standard Version: Lips 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lips 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mustache 3×, Facial hair 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8222 across 5 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8222 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H8222 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H8222 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- moustache
Word origin
n.[m.] moustache (cf. N. Syriac ܣܲܦܡܵܐ rete; on meaning and form v. Thes Ol408 Köii 73);—abs. שׂ׳ Mi 3:7 +, sf. שְׂפָמוֹ 2 S 19:25;—moustache: עָשָׂה שׂ׳ 2 S 19:25 (𝔊 μύσταξ) i.e. trim it; עָטָה עַל־שׂ׳ Mi 3:7 Ez 24:17, 22 Lv 13:45 (P; v. I. עטה 1).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שפה (sâphâh) (H8193) — lip.
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.
שָׂפָם
- v. שָׂפָה) upper lip. Cant. R. to I, 7 על שְׂפָמוֹ, v. עָטָה. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XVII, end היה שפמו מכוסה וכ׳ if his upper lip was covered, they knew that he was a mourner; לא היה שפמו וכ׳ if his upper lip was not covered, they knew that he was excommunicated; a. e.
שָׂפָם ²
- 1. same. Targ. Lev. XIII, 45 (O. ed. Berl. סְ׳). Targ. II Sam. XIX, 25 שִׂיפְמֵיה ed. Lag. (oth. ed. סִ׳). Targ. Ez. XXIV, 17; 22. Targ. Mic. III, 7.—Pl. שִׁפְמֵי, שִׂי׳, סִ׳. Sabb. 129ᵇ מאה ש׳ (Ms. O. וש׳ only; Ms. M. מאה ס׳), v. קַרְנָא I. Ib. האידנא יומא דש׳ הוא to-day is a day of lip-shaving, i.e. a day spent without profit.
- 2. border. Targ. Y. I Ex. XXVIII, 32 (Y. II ספווא).—[Targ. Y. Num. XXX, 13 שפמהא, read: שִׂפְתָהָא.]
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 4 distinct written forms H8222 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שָׂפָ֖ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 13:45 | 2 |
| שְׂפָמ֗/וֹ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 19:24 | 1 |
| שָׂפָ֔ם | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 24:17 | 1 |
| שָׂפָם֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 24:22 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
