an enclosed open yard belonging to a larger building, especially the walled space around the tabernacle, temple, or a palace
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This is the open space hemmed in by walls or hangings that surrounds an important building. It is not a room inside the building and not the building itself, but the bounded yard you cross to reach it. The same word covers the fenced court of the tabernacle, the layered courts of Solomon's temple, the inner spaces of a king's palace, and the open yard of a prison.
In worship settings the word carries weight beyond its plain meaning. To stand in the courts of the LORD was to be admitted into God's presence at the sanctuary, so the temple courts became a shorthand for nearness to God and the joy of belonging there. Because access to each court was controlled, the word also marks the boundary between insiders and outsiders, between the holy and the common.
The sense stays stable across these settings: a defined yard, set off by a wall or curtain, attached to and serving a more important structure.
Nuances
1athe walled court around the tabernacle or temple, the sacred yard of worship
an unwalled rural settlement: a cluster of dwellings out in the open country, smaller and less defended than a walled town
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This is a settlement without a wall around it, the open-country counterpart to a fortified town. The law treats it differently from a walled city precisely because it has no wall, and it names the kind of place where seminomadic groups and herders lived in their own scattered communities.
The word turns up most often in lists that divide a region into its towns and the smaller places that depend on them. In those lists a walled town is paired with its surrounding settlements, the satellite hamlets that belong to it. The element also lives on in many biblical place names that begin with Hazar, marking a spot first known as such an open settlement.
Though it shares spelling with the word for a building's courtyard, this is a separate word with its own history and meaning. The link a reader might guess, an open enclosure of dwellings, is folk logic rather than a shared origin.
Nuances
2athe smaller settlements that belong to and depend on a walled town, as set out in territorial lists
before it names any settlement at all, it names a courtyard: the enclosed open yard belonging to the tabernacle, the temple, or a great houseExo 27:91Ki 6:36Est 5:1
that courtyard is where a worshipper actually stood, so the word becomes the language of nearness to God, something a town name could never carryPsa 84:2Psa 65:4Psa 100:4
as a place to live it is a small outlying holding on the land, the sort of place herdsmen and tent dwellers keep, with no public life of its ownGen 25:16Deu 2:23Neh 11:25
in the law its houses go with the fields rather than with the property of a town, and can always be bought back, which is why many now picture a lone farmstead out on the land rather than a village streetLev 25:31
Both
both are real places where people live and own houses, and the law of the jubilee sets the two side by side as the two kinds of home a person can buyLev 25:30Lev 25:31
the tribal land lists pair them as the two grades of settlement, counting so many towns "with their villages" so that nothing inhabited is left out of an inheritanceJos 15:32Jos 19:16
the smaller places are reckoned as belonging to a named town, so the two are handed over together when land changes handsJos 21:121Ch 4:33
prophets and genealogies put them together to mean everywhere people live, from the desert holdings to the built townsIsa 42:111Ch 4:32
the standing word for a place with public life: a gate where business and judgment are done, elders who speak for it, a population that acts as one bodyGen 34:20Rut 4:2Jdg 9:51
it is the unit of history and of war, the thing that gets founded, besieged, taken, and broken openGen 11:4Jos 6:202Ki 25:4
it can be guilty or innocent as a whole, spared or judged as a single moral bodyGen 18:26Jon 1:2Ezk 22:2
it can stand alone as a name, so that "the city" means Jerusalem, mourned or exalted under that one wordLam 1:1Psa 48:8Isa 52:1
a house inside one is permanent property, sold beyond recall once a year has passed, a standing the smaller kind of settlement never hasLev 25:30
This is a yard people are invited into. Worshippers walk through its gates, stand in it, sing in it, and long to be there, and it can also be trampled by the wrong sort of worship.Psa 100:4Psa 84:10Isa 1:12
It reaches far beyond the sanctuary to any walled yard attached to a building: the inner court of a palace where an uninvited visitor risks death, the guarded yard where a prophet is held, even the yard of an ordinary house with a well in it.Est 5:1Jer 32:22Sa 17:18
In its second sense it stops being part of a building at all and becomes a place on the map, the open settlement or cluster of homes listed alongside towns and set against houses that have a wall around them.Gen 25:16Lev 25:31Jos 15:32
Both
Both name open ground inside Ezekiel's temple complex rather than a roofed room, which is why the guided tour walks through one to reach the other and English versions often blur the pair, one rendered "court" and the other "separate place" or "yard".Ezk 41:15Ezk 42:1
Both are fixed points in the layout that measure how close a person may come, since the priests' rooms are placed by naming each one: the chambers sit along the wall of the one and face the other.Ezk 42:10
Names ground that is meant to stay empty. The strip is described by what borders it and by how wide it is, never by anyone using it, and the rooms facing it are the ones where only the priests eat and store the holiest offerings, so the open space works as a gap that keeps everyone else back.Ezk 41:12Ezk 42:13
It is an area rather than an enclosure. Nothing is ever said to fence it in, no wall, hanging, gate, or doorway; it is located instead by what stands beside it, the temple on one side and a building on the other.Ezk 41:13Ezk 41:14
Outside the temple vision the word leaves architecture behind and traces the outline of a human body, remembering how Jerusalem's young leaders once looked.Lam 4:7
Names a settled village that belongs permanently to the land: the small unwalled places counted up with the walled towns they depend on, town by town, in the lists of tribal territory.Jos 15:32Jos 19:6Deu 2:23
A village of this kind is fixed enough to be real estate with legal standing: its houses have no wall around them, so the law treats them like farmland, redeemable at any time and released in the jubilee year.Lev 25:31
The same word names a walled courtyard, the open space enclosed by hangings or stonework and entered by a gate: the court of the tabernacle, the courts of the temple, the courtyard of a palace.Exo 27:9Exo 40:331Ki 6:36Est 5:1
Because it is an enclosed space with a gate, it is somewhere people go and stand: worshippers come in to praise, a prisoner is held there, a king is approached there.Psa 100:4Psa 84:2Jer 32:2Est 4:11
Both
Both name the dwelling places of a people group rather than a fortified city, and Genesis 25:16 sets them side by side: Ishmael's twelve chiefs are listed by their settled villages and by their camps, the two ways one large family holds land.Gen 25:16
Names the movable camp of a herding people, tents and pens pitched on ground the campers do not own and can move on from: invaders from the east will set their camps in Ammon and live off its fruit and milk, and Midian's camps are counted apart from the towns they lived in.Ezk 25:4Num 31:10
Being tents and pens rather than stone, the whole of it can be wiped out in one stroke: Midian's camps are burned along with their towns, and a curse asks that a camp be left empty of anyone living in it.Num 31:10Psa 69:25
In two places the word means the encircling stonework itself, the ring or course laid around something, rather than the space inside it: a silver crown of stone built on top of a wall, and the courses of masonry running around the temple kitchens.Sng 8:9Ezk 46:23
Also names a settlement rather than any part of a building: the unwalled hamlets of the open country and the dependent villages listed around each town in the tribal boundary lists.Gen 25:16Jos 15:32Neh 11:25Isa 42:11
Covers everyday yards outside the sanctuary too: the inner court of a foreign king's palace, the yard of a private house with a well in it, and the guarded compound where a prisoner is held.Est 5:12Sa 17:18Jer 32:2
Is the word the building instructions use for the tabernacle's yard, with its hangings, posts, sockets and screen all measured out under this name.Exo 27:9Exo 38:9Exo 40:33
Carries a life of its own in worship poetry, where standing in the LORD's courts stands for being welcomed near to God.Psa 84:2Psa 100:4Psa 116:19
Both
Both name an area shut in by a firm boundary at the sanctuary, and Chronicles sets them side by side in one sentence for two different yards of the same temple.2Ch 4:9
Both mark out places where blood is applied when the sanctuary is purified, named in the same breath as the priest moves from the altar to the gateposts.Ezk 45:19
English Bibles render both as "court" in the temple passages, so a reader working from a translation cannot tell which of the two words is standing there.2Ch 4:9
Names something far smaller than a yard in Ezekiel's temple vision: the ledge running around the altar, a narrow shelf given its own width and length in the measurements.Ezk 43:14Ezk 43:17
Is treated as a working surface in the rites that put the altar into service, since the priest daubs blood on its four corners.Ezk 43:20
Picks out the one large outer yard of the temple in Chronicles, the space with its own bronze-plated doors where the king could stand facing the whole assembly.2Ch 6:13
ḥatser in the other biblical languages
αὐλήGreek“palace/courtyard”the Greek word for a courtyard or palace court, the counterpart of חצר in its court sense
Also means a settlement: an unwalled village or a ring of tent dwellings, which is why it fills out town lists and turns up inside place names as the ordinary word for the smaller places around a city.Gen 25:16Lev 25:31Jos 15:32Neh 11:25
Carries a graded system of holy access, since the sanctuary has more than one of these spaces: a walled inner one the priests enter to serve, and a larger one beyond it, each with its own rules about who may cross which boundary.1Ki 6:362Ch 4:9Ezk 40:17Ezk 44:17
Is where Israel actually meets God as a people: the crowd stands there to pray, prophets are sent to speak there, and the poets long for it as the place they most want to be.2Ch 20:5Jer 26:2Psa 84:2Psa 100:4
Both
Both are the standard word for the walled open ground belonging to the temple, the space a worshipper crosses before reaching the sanctuary itself, which is why the Greek word does the work of the Hebrew one when the temple area is in view.Exo 27:92Ch 7:7Rev 11:2
Both name the open yard inside the walls of a great house, an outdoor space where people wait, warm themselves at a fire, and are recognized by whoever else is standing around.2Sa 17:18Est 5:1Mrk 14:54Mat 26:69
Both picture a space defined by its boundary rather than by a roof: what makes it one place is the wall around it and the single gateway into it, so getting in depends on being let through.Exo 27:16Ezk 40:28Jhn 18:15
Stretches from the yard to the whole walled residence, so English Bibles often render it "palace" where the word itself only pictures an enclosure: the high priest's compound where the plot against Jesus is laid, the governor's headquarters, and the strong man's guarded property.Mat 26:3Mrk 15:16Luk 11:21
Names a sheepfold, the walled pen where a flock is shut in for the night, and Jesus builds a whole picture of belonging on it: the true shepherd comes in by the gate, and there are sheep of his still outside the fold.Jhn 10:1Jhn 10:16
κώμηGreek“village”the Greek word for a village, the counterpart of חצר in its settlement sense
Also means an enclosed court or courtyard, most often the walled court of the tabernacle, a sense of bounded sacred space that the Greek word does not share at all.Exo 27:9Exo 40:8Lev 6:16
Both
Both name the unwalled settlement, the small dwelling place set apart from a fortified city, which is one of the two things the Hebrew word covers.Luk 8:1Gen 25:16Jos 15:32
Means only a village and nothing else, a rural settlement that is the setting for travel, teaching, and named homes such as Bethany and Bethlehem.Jhn 11:1Jhn 7:42Luk 9:56
What scholars say about ḥatser
Standard lexicons treat the spelling חצר as two distinct words. HALOT and BDB list חָצֵר I court, courtyard and חָצֵר II settlement, village as separate entries, reflecting that the village sense has cognates in the surrounding languages tied to settling or enclosing land, while the court sense belongs to architectural vocabulary. DCH likewise separates them. The court sense dominates the tabernacle and temple texts of Exodus, Kings, Chronicles, and Ezekiel; the settlement sense dominates the territorial town lists of Joshua and the Hazar place names. The theological weight of the temple courts is developed in the Psalms and treated in the standard theological dictionaries.