Word study

Pot

3 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: pot, pots. 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 “pot” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • סִיר sîrpottranslated this way 25 times of its 34 uses · Strong’s H5518Noun  ·  Translated: pots 11, pot 11, thorns 4, washbasin 2

    Exodus 16:3 “If only we had died by the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt!” they said. “There we sat by pots of meat and ate our fill of bread, but you have brought us into this desert to starve this whole assembly to death!”

    1 Kings 7:45 and the pots, shovels, and sprinkling bowls. All the articles that Huram made for King Solomon in the house of the LORD were made of burnished bronze.

    Full study and all 32 verses →
  • כְּלִי kelîarticle, utensil, vesseltranslated this way 6 times of its 282 uses · Strong’s H3627Noun  ·  Translated: articles 59, utensils 32, weapons 20, furnishings 15

    Leviticus 6:28 The clay pot in which the sin offering is boiled must be broken; if it is boiled in a bronze pot, the pot must be scoured and rinsed with water.

    Leviticus 11:33 If any of them falls into a clay pot, everything in it will be unclean; you must break the pot.

    Full study and all 255 verses →
  • פָּרוּר pârûrpottranslated this way 3 times of its 3 uses · Strong’s H6517Noun  ·  Translated: cooking pot 2, pot 1

    Numbers 11:8 The people walked around and gathered it, ground it on a handmill or crushed it in a mortar, then boiled it in a cooking pot or shaped it into cakes. It tasted like pastry baked with fine oil.

    Judges 6:19 So Gideon went in and prepared a young goat and unleavened bread and an ephah of flour. He placed the meat in a basket and the broth in a pot and brought them out to present to Him under the oak.

    Full study and all 3 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. 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.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. 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.