תָּאַר
to draw
‘to draw’ 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 Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- 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
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 3 times (38%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8388 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.
Joshua 5 verses
- Joshua 15:9 וְ/תָאַ֨ר וְ/תָאַ֤ר conj + Qal pf 3ms conj + Qal pf 3ms and the border extended from the top of the mountain to the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, and went out to the cities of Mount Ephron; and the border extended to Baalah (the same is Kiriath Jearim);
- Joshua 15:11 וְ/תָאַ֤ר conj + Qal pf 3ms and the border went out to the side of Ekron northward; and the border extended to Shikkeron, and passed along to Mount Baalah, and went out at Jabneel; and the goings out of the border were at the sea.
- Joshua 18:14 וְ/תָאַ֣ר conj + Qal wpf 3ms The border extended [there], and turned about on the west quarter southward, from the mountain that lies before Beth Horon southward; and the goings out of it were at Kiriath Baal (the same is Kiriath Jearim), a city of the children of Judah: this was the west quarter.
- Joshua 18:17 וְ/תָאַ֣ר conj + Qal wpf 3ms and it extended northward, and went out at En Shemesh, and went out to Geliloth, which is over against the ascent of Adummim; and it went down to the stone of Bohan the son of Reuben;
- Joshua 19:13 הַ/מְּתֹאָ֖ר ptcl def.art + Pual ptcp.pass ms and from there it passed along eastward to Gath Hepher, to Eth-kazin; and it went out at Rimmon which stretches to Neah;
Isaiah 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.
“to draw” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb תאר (tâʼar). It clusters heavily in Joshua, which alone accounts for 83% of its uses. It turns up in 6 verses across 2 books, an uncommon footprint. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Older and newer Bibles part ways — “was drawn” in the King James Version, “curved” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8388 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.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Was drawn 5×, He marketh it out 2×
- American Standard Version†: Extended 5×, He marketh it out 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Curved 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Turned 4×, And 2×, He marks it 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8388 across 7† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8388 across 7† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8388 across 8† 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 H8388 across 13† 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.
Senses in the full BDB
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 0 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.
תאר I incline
תאר II draw in outline, trace out
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
תָּאַר vb. appar. incline
[ תָּאַר ] vb. Pi. denom. draw in outline, trace out
— 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.
תֹּאַר
- , v. תּוֹאַר
תָּאַר
- , Pi. תֵּאֵר (denom. of תּוֹאַר) to shape; to give a fine appearance to, improve. Num. R. s. 1010 הגילוח מְתָאֲרוֹ ומייפהו cutting his hair improves his appearance, and makes him handsome.—Part. pass. מְתוֹאָר. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XI היה מת׳ בדמות וכ׳ was formed in the image of God.
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 H8388 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/תָאַ֣ר | Verb, Qal, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Joshua 18:14 | 2 |
| וְ/תָאַ֤ר | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Joshua 15:9 | 2 |
| הַ/מְּתֹאָ֖ר | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joshua 19:13 | 1 |
| וְ/תָאַ֨ר | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Joshua 15:9 | 1 |
| יְתָאֲרֵ֣/הוּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 44:13 | 1 |
| יְתָאֳרֵ֑/הוּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 44:13 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8388, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
