שָׁרָה
to set free
‘to set free’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8281 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Jeremiah 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.
At its core, שרה (shârâh) means “to set free.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. Its uses cluster heavily in Jeremiah (100% of all occurrences). Scripture uses it exactly once, at Jeremiah 15:11. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Piel. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8281 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: It 1×, Remnant 1×
- American Standard Version: It 1×, Thee for good 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He unleashes 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8281 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8281 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8281 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
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 2 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.
Qal
- Impf. 3 ms. sf. יִשְׁרֵ֫הוּ Jb 37:3 he (God) lets it loose (i.e. the thunder). e.g. Job 37:3
Piel
- Pf. 1 s. sf. שֵׁרִיתִ֫ךָ Je 15:11 Qr I will set thee free (cf. 40:4 𝔗 𝔖), but dub.; Kt שרותך (i.e. שָׁרוֹתִךָ, √ שׁרר), Thes Gie I vex thee [שַׁרַר = צָרַר, very dub.]; Ew al. RV strengthen thee; this yields best sense, but as Aramaic שׁרר is intrans., read then שֵׁרַרְתִּךָ or הֲשֵׁרוֹתִךָ, Dr; Jerome Rabb read שֵׁרִיתְךָ = שְׁאֵרִיתְךָ thy remnant (AV). e.g. Jeremiah 15:11
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
vb. let loose (NH id., dissolve; Assyrian šarû, Pi. open (building, for use), dedicate it; tašr̂tu, dedication; Old Aramaic שרה loose, so Aramaic שְׁרָא, ܫܪܳܐ; Ethiopic ሰረየ; remit, condone);—
— 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.
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.
שָׂרָה
- m. ch., v. שָׂרָא
שָׂרָה ²
- (b. h.)
- 1. princess, v. שַׂר.
- 2. pr. n. f. Sarah, a) wife of Abraham. Ber. 13ᵃ ש׳ היא שרי Sarah and Sarai have the same meaning. Snh. 39ᵇ עדין … יופי של ש׳ she had not yet attained to half the beauty of Sarah. Gen. R. s. 39 אברהם … וש׳ וכ׳ Abraham convented the men, and Sarah the women; a. v. fr.—b) Gitt. 34ᵇ ופורתא ש׳, v. פֹּורְתָּא.
שָׁרָה
- , v. שרי
שרי
- to dissolve, soak, steep. Naz. VI, 1 ש׳ פתו ביין וכ׳ if he (the Nazirite) steeped his bread in wine, and there is enough in both together to make up the size of an olive; Pes. 44ᵇ. Naz. 37ᵃ אם ש׳ ענביו במים וכ׳ if he steeped grapes in water, and a taste of wine remained in it. Pes. II, 7 אין שׁוֹרִין וכ׳ you dare not soak bran for chickens (on the Passover); ib. האשה לא תִשְׁרֶה וכ׳ a woman must not soak bran to take with her to the bathhouse. Sabb. I, 5 אין שורין … כדי שיִשּׁוֹרוּ וכ׳ you must not lay in ink-materials or dyes …, unless they can be dissolved (or soaked through) before the Sabbath sets in. Eduy. I, 8; a. fr.
- to be soaked, dissolved. Y. Ber. IX, 13ᵈ bot. כדי שתִּשָּׁרֶה וכ׳, v. מְגוּפָה; Y. Taan. I, 64ᵇ top שתשרף (corr. acc.). Gen. R. s. 17, end אדם … מיד היא נִשְׁרֵית … אינו נִשְׁרֶה man is made out of earth, when you put a drop of water on it, it is at once dissolved (soft), but woman is made of a bone, which is not dissolved, even if you let it lie in water for many days. Y. Sabb. XIV, 14ᶜ top כל … והיא נשרית … ושאינה נשרית וכ׳ when you put salt in, and it dissolves, it is called salt water, but when it is not dissolved, it is called halmé; a. e.—Sabb. I, 5 יִשּׁוֹרוּ (fr. שור or נשר), v. supra.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8281, 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
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 5 — 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
