שֶׁ֫רֶץ
swarmers
‘swarmers’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- 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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 9 times (60%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 6 times (40%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 15 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8318 appears — 15 distinct verses across 3 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.
Genesis 2 verses
- Genesis 1:20 שֶׁ֖רֶץ n c ms cs God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of sky."
- Genesis 7:21 הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms All flesh died that moved on the earth, including birds, cattle, animals, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and every man.
Leviticus 12 verses
- Leviticus 5:2 שֶׁ֣רֶץ n c ms "'Or if anyone touches any unclean thing, whether it is the carcass of an unclean animal, or the carcass of unclean cattle, or the carcass of unclean creeping things, and it is hidden from him, and he is unclean, then he shall be guilty.
- Leviticus 11:10 שֶׁ֣רֶץ n c ms cs All that don't have fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of all the living creatures that are in the waters, they are an abomination to you,
- Leviticus 11:20 שֶׁ֣רֶץ n c ms cs "'All flying insects that walk on all fours are an abomination to you.
- Leviticus 11:21 שֶׁ֣רֶץ n c ms cs Yet you may eat these: of all winged creeping things that go on all fours, which have legs above their feet, with which to hop on the earth.
- Leviticus 11:23 שֶׁ֣רֶץ n c ms cs But all winged creeping things which have four feet, are an abomination to you.
- Leviticus 11:29 בַּ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ prep det + n c ms "'These are they which are unclean to you among the creeping things that creep on the earth: the weasel, the rat, any kind of great lizard,
- Leviticus 11:31 הַ/שָּׁ֑רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms These are they which are unclean to you among all that creep. Whoever touches them when they are dead, shall be unclean until the evening.
- Leviticus 11:41 הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms "'Every creeping thing that creeps on the earth is an abomination. It shall not be eaten.
- Leviticus 11:42 הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms Whatever goes on its belly, and whatever goes on all fours, or whatever has many feet, even all creeping things that creep on the earth, them you shall not eat; for they are an abomination.
- Leviticus 11:43 הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms You shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing that creeps, neither shall you make yourselves unclean with them, that you should be defiled thereby.
- Leviticus 11:44 הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ ptcl def.art + n c ms For I am Yahweh your God. Sanctify yourselves therefore, and be holy; for I am holy: neither shall you defile yourselves with any kind of creeping thing that moves on the earth.
- Leviticus 22:5 שֶׁ֖רֶץ n c ms or whoever touches any creeping thing, whereby he may be made unclean, or a man of whom he may take uncleanness, whatever uncleanness he has;
Deuteronomy 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.
“swarmers” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun שרץ (sherets). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Leviticus. It appears 15 verses across 3 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. First canonically at Genesis 1:20, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. See the sense tree, 15-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8318 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 →
- 15
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 15 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,836
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,836 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 15 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 12 verses 80%
- Genesis 2 verses 13%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 7%
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 15 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 15 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: Every creeping thing 3×, Any creeping thing 2×, Creeping things 2×
- American Standard Version: Creeping things 3×, Any creeping thing 2×, Creeping 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Insects 4×, Crawling creature 3×, Creature 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Swarming thing 4×, Swarming thing of 4×, Swarming 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8318 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H8318 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H8318 across 15 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 H8318 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 2 senses 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.
- teeming or swarming things, creepers, swarmers
- of insects, animals, small reptiles, quadrupeds
Word origin
n.m. Gn 7, 21 coll. swarmers, swarming things;—שׁ׳ abs. Lv 11:29 +, שָׁ֑רֶץ v 31; cstr. v 20 +;—swarming things (H D and P), aquatic Gn 1:20 Lv 11:10; small reptiles and quadrupeds Gn 7:21 (+ עוֹף, בְּהֵמָה, חַיָּה), Lv 5:2 (+ חַיָּה, בְּהֵמָה), 11:29 (weasel, mouse, lizard), v 31, 41, 42, 43 (c. cogn. שָׁרַץ) v 44, cf. 22:5; insects, שׁ׳ הָעוֹף Dt 14:19, + הַהֹלֵךְ עַל־אַרְבַּע Lv 11:20, 21, cf. v 23. cf. DrDB i. 518.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שרץ (shârats) (H8317) — to swarm.
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.
שָׁרַץ
- to bring forth moving creatures. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXVII המים … והן שׁוֹרְצִין the waters are the work of his hand, and they beget life.
- same, to cast young, breed. Ex. R. s. 10 צפרדע … הִשְׁרִיצָה וכ׳ there was one frog, and it bred and filled the land &c.; Snh. 67ᵇ; Yalk. Ex. 183. Lev. R. s. 13 מה … מַשְׁרֶצֶת וכ׳ as the scorpion casts sixty at a time &c.; a. e.
שֶׁרֶץ
- Shaf. of רוץ) moving creature, esp. unclean reptile. Tosef. Taan. I, 8 אם יהא הש׳ בידו וכ׳ if a man has a reptile in his hand, he cannot become clean, even if he bathe &c.; השליך הש׳ וכ׳ when he throws the reptile out of his hand, a bath in a basin of forty S’ah avails him (fasting without restitution is of no avail); Y. ib. II, beg. 65ᵃ; Bab. ib. 16ᵃ. Erub. 13ᵇ היה מטהר את הש׳ וכ׳ could prove a reptile to be clean with one hundred and fifty reasons (was a dialectician). Snh. 17ᵃ אין … לטהר ש׳ וכ׳ none could be seated in the Sanhedrin, unless he could prove the cleanness of a reptile from Biblical texts; a. fr.—Pl. שְׁרָצִים. Sabb. XIV, 1 שמנה ש׳ וכ׳ the eight reptiles mentioned in the Torah (Lev. XI, 29, sq.). Yoma 22ᵇ, v. פַּרְנָס; a. fr.—פרשת ש׳ the section treating of unclean animals, in Sifra Sh’mini. e.g. Leviticus 11:29
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 5 distinct written forms H8318 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שֶׁ֣רֶץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 14:19 | 6 |
| הַ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 7:21 | 5 |
| שֶׁ֖רֶץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 22:5 | 2 |
| בַּ/שֶּׁ֖רֶץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:29 | 1 |
| הַ/שָּׁ֑רֶץ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:31 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 15 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 15 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.
