שְׁרָא
to loosen
also: abide, begin fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Piel verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Qal Passive
- An archaic passive of the Qal, preserved in a few forms.
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- 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”).
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
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.
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).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Piel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Poal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Qal Passive, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (17%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8271 appears — 6 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.
Ezra 1 verse
Daniel 5 verses
- Daniel 2:22 שְׁרֵֽא Qal ptcp.pass ms he reveals the deep and secret things; he knows what is in the darkness, and the light dwells with him.
- Daniel 3:25 שְׁרַ֨יִן֙ Qal Passive ptcp.pass mp He answered, Look, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.
- Daniel 5:6 מִשְׁתָּרַ֔יִן Poal ptcp.pass mp Then the king's face was changed in him, and his thoughts troubled him; and the joints of his loins were loosened, and his knees struck one against another.
- Daniel 5:12 וּ/מְשָׁרֵ֣א conj + Piel ptcp.act mp cs because an excellent spirit, and knowledge, and understanding, interpreting of dreams, and showing of dark sentences, and dissolving of doubts, were found in the same Daniel, whom the king named Belteshazzar. Now let Daniel be called, and he will show the interpretation.
- Daniel 5:16 לְ/מִשְׁרֵ֑א prep + Qal inf.cs But I have heard of you, that you can give interpretations, and dissolve doubts; now if you can read the writing, and make known to me the interpretation of it, you shall be clothed with purple, and have a chain of gold about your neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
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.
שרא (shᵉrêʼ) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to loosen.” Daniel dominates its distribution — 5 of 6 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. Debuting at Ezra 5:2, it then recurs through the corpus. Across 3 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Peal, Pael). The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8271 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) 6 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: Began 1×, Dissolve 1×, Dissolving 1×
- American Standard Version: Began 1×, Dissolve 1×, Dissolving 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Solve 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Began 1×, Dwells 1×, Loosened 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8271 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8271 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8271 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 H8271 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Peal (the basic Aramaic stem, parallel to Qal), Pael (the intensive Aramaic stem, parallel to Piel), and Hithpaal (the reflexive or passive Aramaic stem).
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 4 senses and sub-senses 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.
Peal
- 1. loosen
- 2. abide
Pael
- . begin
Hithpaal
- . joints were loosened (in fear).
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
[ שְׁרָא ] vb. 1. loosen. 2. abide
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שרות (shêrûwth) (H8293) — remnant.
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.
שָׂרָא
- Y. Snh. VII, 25ᵈ גזר … על שרה דימא וכ׳ R. J. commanded the chief of the sea, and he swallowed them up. Lev. R. s. 5 שידא שָׂרֵיהוֹן וכ׳, v. רוּחָא; a. e.
שֵׁרָא
- , v. שֵׁיר, שֵׁירָא.
שְׁרָא
- , v. שְׁרֵי
שְׁרֵי
- 1. to untie, unharness; to disengage, dismiss. Targ. O. Gen. XXIV, 32 וש׳ גמליא (ed. Berl. וש׳ מן ג׳; Y. ושָׁ׳ זממי ג׳ Pa.; h. text ויפתח). Targ. Job XXX, 11. Targ. O. Ex. III, 5 (h. text של); a. fr.—Pes. 113ᵃ שְׁרִי כיסך פתח שפיך untie thy purse (to receive the money), open thy bag (to deliver the goods), i.e. sell for cash. Snh. 98ᵃ כולהון שְׁרוֹ ואסירי … איהו ש׳ חד וכ׳ all of them untie and tie up (their sores) at once (untie all of them, and then tie them up), but he unties and ties up one at a time. Pesik. R. s. 22 [read:] שַׁרְתַּנְהוֹן … ע"ג סודרא she untied them (the two Denars), and placed them on the shawl. Y. Ber. II, 5ᵃ bot. אתת … ושַׁרְתוּן וכ׳ (fr. שרה, cmp. חֲמֵי) when prayer time came, he untied them (the coins), and gave them to R. H.; [read:] קטר פורתיה לפורתיה ויהבון לשמעיה ושרתון וערק he tied his (R. Ḥ’s) share to his own, and gave them to his servant, but he (the servant) untied them and ran away. Y. Meg. IV, 75ᵇ bot. שְׁרוֹן ליה וכ׳, v. סַפְרוּתָא. Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵃ שרון גרמון ומנוניה they dismissed themselves (resigned their office) and appointed him (Hillel) in their place; a. fr.—ש׳ תיגרא to solve a dispute, to settle or decide a case. Ned. 62ᵃ שְׁרוּ לי תיגראי ברישא take my case up first. Yeb. 100ᵃ שָׁרֵינָא וכ׳, v. תִּגְרָא I; a. e.
- 2. to allow, permit; to forgive; to absolve (= h. הִתִּיר). Targ. Y. Num. XXX, 3. Targ. Y. II, Gen. XXII, 14. Targ. Y. II, Num. XIV, 20; a. fr.—Kidd. 13ᵇ הוא אסרה והוא שַׁרְתָהּ (Rashi שרי לה) he tied her (by marrying her), and he untied her (through his death, that she can dispose of herself). Y. Ber. II, 5ᵇ אינון שַׁרְיָין ואינון אסרין do the same men permit and forbid? Y. Snh. VII, end, 25ᵈ [read:] שַׁרְיִי מה דעבדתין אמרה ליה לי נא שַׁרְיָיה undo what thou hast done (by charm); said she to him, I will not undo. Bab. Snh. 99ᵃ ש׳ ליה מריה וכ׳ the Lord forgive R. Hillel. Ab. Zar. 37ᵃ וקרו לן בית דינא שָׁרְיָא and they might call us a permitting court (of lax practice). Ib. כי שְׁרִיתוּהָ לאלתר שריתוה וכ׳ when you permitted her (to marry again), did you permit her to marry at once &c.? Ib. וקרו ליה יוסף שריא and they called him Joseph the permitter. Ib. אנא נמי שְׁרָאִי אחריתי Ms. M. (ed. אנא שרא, corr. acc.) I also permitted another thing (which was forbidden heretofore); a. v. fr.—Part. pass. שָׁרֵי, שַׁרְיָא; f. שַׁרְיָא. Targ. II Esth. III, 8 יומא ש׳ a permitted day (free for trade).—Bets. 3ᵇ לדידי אפי׳ … ש׳ according to my opinion it is permitted even on the first day. Ib. 22ᵃ אפי׳ בשבת ש׳ it is permitted even on the Sabbath. Ned. 62ᵃ ש׳ ליה לאינש לאודועי וכ׳ a man is permitted to make himself known (as a scholar) in a place where they do not know him; a. fr.
- 3. [to loosen the girdle,] to sit down for a meal; trnsf. to start, begin. Targ. Deut. XVI, 9 (O. ed. Berl. תְּשָׁרֵי, Pa.). Targ. II Esth. III, 7; a. fr.—Lam. R. to I, 1 (רבתי) כמה דשְׁרִין למיכל (ed. Wil. דשְׁרוֹ) when they sat down to eat. Y. Dem. I, 21ᵈ bot.; Y. Shek. V, 48ᵈ top שַׁרְיַית מנהקה (not שוריית) she began to bray; a. fr.—Trnsf. (cmp. meanings of b. h. יָאַל Hif.) to consent, be willing. Targ. Josh. VII, 7. Ib. XVII, 12. Targ. Job VI, 9; 28; a. fr.
- 4. to encamp, dwell, rest. Targ. I Sam. XXVI, 5. Targ. Num. II, 2, sq. Targ. Ex. XL, 35. Targ. Ps. XVI, 8, sq.; a. fr.—Y. Ter. VIII, 46ᵃ חמריא שרון וכ׳ ass-drivers took lodging in an inn. Lam. R. to I, 1 רבתי אשכח … שרון יתבין וכ׳ (חד מירוש׳) he found men that had taken lodging there, and sat eating and drinking. Y. Sabb. XIV, 14ᶜ bot. ע"י דהוה ש׳ תמן וכ׳ because he lived there (in Babylonia) &c. Gen. R. s. 20 ויתיר … שרי, v. פָּרָא II. Snh. 39ᵃ כל בי … שָׁרְיָא the Shechinah dwells wherever ten persons are assembled; a. fr.
- same,
- 1. to untie, loosen. Targ. Ps. XXX, 12 (ed. Wil. Pe.). Targ. Job XII, 18 (ed. Wil. מַשְׁרֵי Af.); a. e.
- 2. to begin. Targ. O. Deut. I, 5 (Y. שׁוֹרֵי Poel). Ib. II, 24 (O. ed. Vien. Pe.). Ib. 25. Targ. Jer. IV, 31; a. fr.—Targ. Prov. XIII, 12 דמְשָׁרֵי למעדריה (not משדי, v. Pesh. a. LXX) who begins to help himself (h. text תחלת ממשכה!).
- 3. to cause to rest, v. infra.
- 1. to untie, v. supra.
- 2. to cause to encamp or dwell, to let rest. Targ. Gen. II, 15. Targ. Jer. VII, 7. Targ. Ps. XXIII, 2. Ib. LXXIV, 2 Ms. (ed. Pa.); a. fr.—Sabb. 67ᵃ הסנה … א׳ קודשא וכ׳ O thornbush! not because thou art higher than all other trees did the Lord let his Presence rest upon thee &c. Koh. R. to III, 9, end כל … לא מַשְׁרִין וכ׳ (in the hereafter) they allow every one to dwell only with his fellow tradesmen; ib. beg. מתרין (corr. acc.); a. e.
- 1. to be untied, loosened. Targ. Is. V, 27.—Lev. R. s. 14, v. חֲבִילָא II; a. e.
- 2. to be permitted. Yeb. 106ᵃ כי היכי דתִישְׁתְּרִי לעלמא in order that she may be free to marry again. Bets. 2ᵇ יו"ט בעלמא תשתרי let it be permitted for use on any other Holy Day (not followed by the Sabbath); a. e.
- 3. to be begun, begin. Targ. Y. Gen. XXXVII, 17. Targ. Ps. CXIX, 96, v. שַׁכְלֵל.—Y. Ter. VIII, 46ᵃ מישרי נבח בהון (prob. to be read: אישרי) he began to bark at them; ib. מישרי מתרתר, v. תַּרְתֵּר.—[Lev. R. s. 13 אשתריתין, v. שְׁתַר.]
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 H8271 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/שָׁרִ֣יו | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Ezra 5:2 | 1 |
| וּ/מְשָׁרֵ֣א | Verb, Piel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Daniel 5:12 | 1 |
| לְ/מִשְׁרֵ֑א | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Daniel 5:16 | 1 |
| מִשְׁתָּרַ֔יִן | Verb, Poal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 5:6 | 1 |
| שְׁרֵֽא | Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 2:22 | 1 |
| שְׁרַ֨יִן֙ | Verb, Qal Passive, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 3:25 | 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.
