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אֶשְׁפָּר

piece of meat

H829 Strong's Hebrew
ʼeshpâr Transliteration
/esh-pawr'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 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.

The Hebrew noun אשפר centers on the idea of “piece of meat.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. 2 Samuel dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. Debuting at 2 Samuel 6:19, 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

Strong's · 1890
good piece
Modern gloss
piece of meat
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H829 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
2 Samuel 6:19
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in 2 Samuel 6:19.
1 Chronicles 16:3
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in 1 Chronicles 16:3.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 2 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 2 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%

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: Good piece 1×, Good piece of flesh 1×
  • American Standard Version: Portion 1×, Portion of flesh 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Date cake 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Date cake 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H829 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Good piece” 1×
  • “Good piece of flesh” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H829 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Portion” 1×
  • “Portion of flesh” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H829 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Date cake” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H829 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Date cake” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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. piece of meat, measured portion, date-cake (meaning and significance obscure)

Word origin

אֶשְׁפָּר cake or roll

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

Origin: of uncertain derivation

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 182 . 1


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.

אֶשְׁפָּר

  • a goodly piece (cmp. דָּשְׁנָא), a certain quantity of meat, eshpar. Pes. 36ᵇ א׳ אחד וכ׳ an eshpar is one sixth of a bullock (as if composed of שש and פר; cmp. אֶסְפָּר).

שְׁפַר

  • Targ. Gen. XXXIV, 18. Targ. Ps. LXIX, 32. Targ. Esth. I, 10; a. fr.—Snh. 11ᵇ ושַׁפְרָא מילתא באנפיי וכ׳ and the thing was pleasing in my sight and &c.; Y. ib. I, 18ᵈ top; Y. Maas. Sh. V, 56ᶜ top. Ker. 5ᵇ אי שמין וש׳ וכ׳ if it (the cock) gets fat and well-looking, he may know that he will succeed; a. e.
    • to cleanse, make handsome, pleasant. Targ. Y. Gen. IX, 27 (h. text יפת). Targ. Prov. XV, 2. Ib. XVII, 22 (Ms. מְשַׁפֵּיר Pa.); a. e.—Y. Maasr. I, 49ᵃ bot. יַשְׁפַּר אפוי וכ׳, v. כַּרְיָא I. Y. Taan. I, 64ᵇ bot. מַשְׁפַּר תייטרון cleaning the theatre; a. e.
    • to make one’s self fair, adorn one’s self. Targ. Jer. II, 33.

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 H829 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/אֶשְׁפָּ֖ר Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 Chronicles 16:3 1
וְ/אֶשְׁפָּ֣ר Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 Samuel 6:19 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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).

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