Word study
Leper
2 Hebrew and 1 Greek words behind this English word
The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: leper, lepers. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.
At a glance
How often each original word is translated “leper” or one of its forms.
Compare the Hebrew words side by side
Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)
- צָרַע tsârabe struck with leprosy, leproustranslated this way 4 times of its 19 uses · Strong’s H6879Verb · Translated: leprous 5, skin disease 3, leper 3, leprosy 3Full study and all 17 verses →
2 Kings 5:1 Now Naaman, the commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man in his master’s sight and highly regarded, for through him the LORD had given victory to Aram. And he was a mighty man of valor, but he was a leper.
2 Chronicles 26:21 So King Uzziah was a leper until the day of his death. He lived in isolation, leprous and cut off from the house of the LORD, while his son Jotham had charge of the royal palace and governed the people of the land.
- צָרַעַת tsâraathleprosytranslated this way 1 time of its 35 uses · Strong’s H6883Noun · Translated: skin disease 8, mildew 7, leprosy 4, disease 3Full study and all 32 verses →
2 Kings 5:7 When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and asked, “Am I God, killing and giving life, that this man expects me to cure a leper? Surely you can see that he is seeking a quarrel with me!”
Greek words (New Testament)
- λεπρός leprósa lepertranslated this way 9 times of its 9 uses · Strong’s G3015Adjective · Translated: lepers 5, leper 4Full study and all 9 verses →
Matthew 8:2 Suddenly a leper came and knelt before Him, saying, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”
Mark 1:40 Then a leper came to Jesus, begging on his knees: “If You are willing, You can make me clean.”
How to study a word well
- Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
- Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
- Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
- Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
- See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
- Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
- Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.
Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.