תָּפַר
to sew
‘to sew’ is one of 2 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
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘they sewed together fig-leaves’
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- 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”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
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”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8609 appears in the Book of Ecclesiastes — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Ecclesiastes
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 sew” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb תפר (tâphar). With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It concentrates in Genesis, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. First canonically at Genesis 3:7, it enters the text early. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Piel. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8609 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 1 verse 25%
- Job 1 verse 25%
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 50%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 25%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 25%
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: I have sewed 1×, Sew 1×, They sewed 1×
- American Standard Version: Fig -leaves together 1×, I have sewed 1×, Sew 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: I have sewn 1×, Mend 1×, They sewed together 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: I have sewn 1×, Mend 1×, They sewed 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8609 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8609 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8609 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8609 across 5 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.
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. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- they sewed together fig-leaves
Piel
- . those who keep sewing
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
[ תָּפַר ] vb. sew together
— 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.
תָּפַר
- (b. h.) to join; to sew, mend. Men. 31ᵇ קרע … יִתְפּוֹר בשלש אל יתפור if a rent (in the column of a scroll) goes through two lines, one may mend it; if through three, you dare not mend it (but must insert a new column). Sabb. XIII, 2 התּוֹפֵר … על מנת לִתְפּוֹר, v. תְּפִירָה. Ib. 60ᵇ תְּפָרוֹ מבפנים if he fastened the leather shoe inside the sandal; a. fr.—Part. pass. תָּפוּר; f. תְּפוּרָה; pl. תְּפוּרִים, תְּפוּרִין, תְּפוּרוֹת. Tosef. Toh. V, 1 נפל למים ת׳ טמא if it (spittle) fell into water, if it remains joined (cohesive), it is clean, opp. נמחה dissolved. Sabb. l. c.; Bets. I, 10 כלים בין ת׳ ובין שאינן ת׳ garments when sewed or unsewed. Ib. מנעל שאינו ת׳ a shoe the sole of which is not sewed on (though temporarily fastened with pegs); a. fr.
- to be sewed. Kel. XX, 6 משיִתָּפֵר Var. (ed. משיִתָּבֵר) when the material for the curtain is sewed up; [Maim. reads משישבר = משישפר, expl. ‘when he has given it its due length and width by sewing’; for dialectic interchange of ב and פ see בָּקַר a. פָּקַר Hif., and הֶבְקֵר a. הֶפְקֵר].
תְּפַר
- Men. 35ᵇ מהו למִיתְפְּרֵיה וכ׳ how about sewing it and sticking the seam inside?; a. e.
תֹּפֶר
- (preced.) seam. Men. 35ᵃ; Meg. 24ᵇ בתָפְרָן ובאלכסונן (or בתִפְרָן; Rashi בתוֹפְרָן), v. אֲלַכְסוֹן. Men. l. c. צריך … למקום הת׳ the grooves (marking the division of the compartments of the T’fillin) must reach to where the seam (the border) sets in. Kel. XXIII, 1 מפני שהת׳ מחברו because the seam joins it (makes the stuffing and the cover one body). Ib. XXVIII, 1; a. e.
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 4 distinct written forms H8609 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַֽ/יִּתְפְּרוּ֙ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Genesis 3:7 | 1 |
| לִ/תְפּ֔וֹר | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Ecclesiastes 3:7 | 1 |
| לִֽ/מְתַפְּר֨וֹת | Verb, Piel, Participle Active, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 13:18 | 1 |
| תָּ֭פַרְתִּי | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Job 16:15 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
