בָּאַר
to make clear
‘to make clear’ is one of 4 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
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H874 appears in the Book of Habakkuk — 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.
Habakkuk
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.
באר — transliterated bâʼar — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to make clear.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. Debuting at Deuteronomy 1:5, it then recurs through the corpus. BDB distinguishes 4 senses for it. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H874 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 2 verses 67%
- Habakkuk 1 verse 33%
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 3 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 67%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
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: Declare 1×, Make it plain 1×, Plainly 1×
- American Standard Version: Declare 1×, Make it plain 1×, Plainly 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Clearly 1×, Distinctly 1×, Explain 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Explaining 1×, Make 1×, Plain 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H874 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H874 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H874 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H874 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 4 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.
(Piel)
- to make plain, distinct
- to make clear
- to declare
- letters on a tablet
Word origin
[ באר ] vb. only Pi. make distinct, plain
— 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.
בָּאַר
- (√בא, v. בֹּוא)
- 1. to break forth, come to light. Denom. בְּאֵר; cmp. טוּף.
- 2. to be open, clear. —Pi. בֵּאֵר (b. h.) to proclaim (cmp. Deut. I, 5), to explain; to make clear (to one’s self), to understand clearly. Y. M. Kat. III, 83ᵇ top לבָאֵר משנתו to explain (argue on) what he has learned. Koh. R. to VI, 9 better is he שהוא מְבָאֵר משנתו וכ׳ who dwells on his studies to make them clear to himself, than he who learns to recite fluently.—Part. pass. מְבֹאָר proven, clear. Yad. III, 1 מ׳ הדבר (Talm. ed. מ׳ את הד׳) from this fact it is proven. e.g. Deuteronomy 1:5
בְּאַר
- Pa. בָּאֵר same. Y. M. Kat. III, 83ᵇ top לא חכמין מְבָאֲרָה know not how to make clear (argue).
בְּאֵר
- preced.) well, spring. Gen. R. s. 93; a. fr.—Erub. X, 14 (104ᵃ; 104ᵇ), v. הָקֵר. Taan. 9ᵃ ב׳ בזכות מרים the well in the desert was given to the Israelites for Miriam’s sake; a. fr.—Transf. origin. Y. Sot. II, 18ᵃ (play on בוראיך, Koh. XII, 1) remember בְּאֵירְךָ וכ׳ thy well (whence thou camest), thy pit (grave), thy Creator; Lev. R. s. 18, beg.—Pl. בְּאֵרוֹת. Y. Erub. II, beg. 20ᵃ ב׳ הקר, v. הָקֵר. V. בּוֹר II. e.g. Ecclesiastes 12:1
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 3 distinct written forms H874 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בֵּאֵ֛ר | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 1:5 | 1 |
| בַּאֵ֥ר | Verb, Piel, Infinitive Absolute | Deuteronomy 27:8 | 1 |
| וּ/בָאֵ֖ר | Verb, Piel, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Habakkuk 2:2 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H874, 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 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
