בֹּאר
cistern
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
2 distinct verses where H877 appears in the Construct state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
2 Samuel 2 verses
- 2 Samuel 23:15 מִ/בֹּ֥אר prep + n c ms cs David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me water to drink of the well of Bethlehem, which is by the gate!
- 2 Samuel 23:16 מִ/בֹּ֤אר prep + n c ms cs The three mighty men broke through the host of the Philistines, and drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate, and took it, and brought it to David: but he would not drink of it, but poured it out to Yahweh.
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 bôʼr — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “cistern.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in 2 Samuel (67% of all occurrences). Debuting at 2 Samuel 23:15, it then recurs through the corpus. From the same root come באר, באר and באש. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H877 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.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Cisterns 2×
- American Standard Version: Cisterns 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cisterns 2×, Well 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cisterns 2×, Well of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H877 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H877 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H877 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H877 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- cistern, pit, well
Word origin
[ בֹאר ] n.m. cistern, pit, well
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from באר (bâʼar) (H874) — to make clear.
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 4 distinct written forms H877 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בֹּאר֔וֹת | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 2:13 | 1 |
| בֹּארֹת֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 2:13 | 1 |
| מִ/בֹּ֤אר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 23:16 | 1 |
| מִ/בֹּ֥אר | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 23:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H877, 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.
Derives from
Shares the same root
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.
