a fortified place: a walled town, or the defensive stronghold that guards it, built to hold out against attack
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
This word names a place built to keep attackers out: a town ringed with walls, or the defensive works that protect it. It comes from a verb meaning to cut off or make unreachable, so the basic picture is a place made hard to get into.
Most often it describes a fortified city, a walled town that serves as the strong point of its region. In many other passages it stands for the fortress or the defenses of a whole nation, the ramparts and strongholds that an invading army has to burn and that God, in the prophets, promises to throw down. The line between the two is thin, since a fortified city is itself a fortress, and the same word covers both the town and its walls.
Because it stands for human strength at its most secure, it easily becomes an image. God can make a single person into one, as when he tells the prophet Jeremiah that he has made him a fortified city no hostile nation can break.
Nuances
1aa fortified city: a walled town that serves as the strong point of its region
1ca fortress as an image of unbreakable strength, as when God makes his prophet a fortified city no enemy can overpower
Jer 1:18Jer 6:27*
Jer 6:27
Whether the word for fortress belongs in the received text of this verse.
majorityIt is original and pictures Jeremiah as an unbreakable fortress among the people, continuing the fortified-city image of Jeremiah 1:18.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. מבצר
minorityIt is a secondary addition or a corruption to be emended, since assayer and fortress do not fit together naturally.; William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1 (ICC, 1986)
often names a whole walled town, not just one military building, so it can mean the fortified cities of an entire regionNum 32:362Ki 18:8
Both
both name a strongly walled place built to hold out against attack, the kind an army must burn or throw downAmo 5:9Nam 3:12
Only fortress
the English word pictures a single castle or keep, which can hide that the text usually means an entire defended city
“fortified city”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“stronghold”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“defenses”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How mivtsar differs from similar Hebrew words
מָעוֹזa place of safety or refuge to rely on, very often a picture of God himself as one's protection, whereas this word is the concrete walled fortification people trust in
Always names a concrete, human-built fortification: a walled, fortified city or defensive works raised by hand.Num 13:19Jos 19:352Ki 18:8
Stands for a nation's military strength as embodied in its fortified towns, the very defenses God can tear down in judgment.Psa 89:40Isa 25:12Nam 3:12
Both
Both can name a strong fortified place, and Daniel's vision of the last king sets them side by side, using each of the mightiest strongholds he seizes and defends.Dan 11:39
Names God himself as a person's stronghold, the secure One a believer runs to for safety in the day of trouble.Psa 27:1Nam 1:7Jol 3:16
Works as a relational refuge, a place or person one takes shelter in, not only a structure of stone.Psa 31:2Psa 37:39Pro 10:29
מְצוּדָהa fortress-refuge or mountain fastness one flees to and holds out in, such as David's stronghold, whereas this word is the built, walled fortification of a town
Names a man-made fortified city, a walled town built for defense, and often appears in the plural for a whole line of such cities.Num 13:192Ki 3:192Ki 18:8
In the prophets it stands for the human defenses people trust in that God promises to tear down in judgment.Isa 25:12Lam 2:2Nam 3:12Mic 5:11
Both
Both name a defended place secure against attack, a stronghold one can rely on for safety from enemies.2Ki 18:81Sa 22:4
Both, for all their strength, can still be overcome by a stronger force and taken or broken.Lam 2:22Sa 5:7
Points to a remote mountain refuge where fugitives shelter, most famously David's hideout while Saul hunted him.1Sa 22:41Sa 24:222Sa 23:14
Names the specific hilltop citadel of Zion that David captured and made his own royal city.2Sa 5:91Ch 11:51Ch 11:16
Becomes a favorite image in the Psalms for God himself as the believer's personal refuge and fortress, a use the other word never has.Psa 18:2Psa 31:3Psa 91:2Psa 144:2
אַרְמוֹןthe fortified palace or citadel inside a city, whereas this word is the whole fortified town or its outer defenses
Names a specific grand building: the fortified palace or citadel keep, especially the royal or noble residence at the heart of a city.1Ki 16:182Ki 15:25Psa 48:3
Carries overtones of wealth and privilege: the treasure-filled strongholds of the elite, singled out for their luxury.Amo 3:10Amo 3:11Amo 6:8
The recurring target of Amos's fire-of-judgment oracles: God sends fire that devours the palaces of nation after nation.Amo 1:4Amo 1:7Amo 2:2
מִשְׂגָּבa secure height or high refuge, often God as one's inaccessible high place, whereas this word is the man-made walled fortification down on the ground
Names a concrete, man-made fortress: a walled, defended town built for war, the ordinary word for a fortified city.Num 13:192Ki 18:8Jer 5:17
Almost always shows up as the target of attack: strongholds that are besieged, captured, torn down, and burned.Lam 2:2Amo 5:9Nam 3:12
Used figuratively of a person made unbreakable, as when God appoints the prophet to be an impregnable fortified city.Jer 1:18Jer 6:27
Both
Both name an inaccessible stronghold whose safety is being beyond an enemy's reach, and Isaiah stacks them together for the same high, walled defense.Isa 25:12
Either can name a real physical fortress that comes to ruin when judgment falls.Lam 2:2Jer 48:1
Overwhelmingly a title for God himself as a personal refuge, especially in the Psalms: the LORD is my high tower.Psa 18:2Psa 46:72Sa 22:3
Frames safety as height, a place lifted up out of reach; its root means to be high and inaccessible.Isa 33:16Psa 48:3
Deeply personal and possessive, an anchor of trust in trouble rather than a described structure: my defense, I shall not be moved.Psa 62:2Psa 59:9Psa 144:2
מִבְצָרMibzar is a biblical name written exactly like מִבְצָר, the common Hebrew word grouped here.
names the fortified place as a whole rather than any part of it, which is why it attaches to towns by name and to a region's roster of walled citiesJos 19:352Ki 18:8
works as a way of sorting settlements into classes, as when scouts are told to report whether the people live in open camps or in walled townsNum 13:19
covers a whole kingdom's defenses at once, the strongholds an invading army is ordered to strike and that God promises to level, so it can stand for national security itselfIsa 17:32Ki 3:19Hos 10:14
Both
both name built defenses that an attacking army has to get past, and both turn up in prophetic scenes of a proud city being brought downNam 3:8Lam 2:8Nam 3:12Lam 2:2
both leave the stonework behind and become pictures of safety, one making God's rescue the defenses around a city and the other making a single prophet a walled town no king can breakIsa 26:1Jer 1:18
names one particular piece of a city's defenses, the low outer line thrown up in front of the main wall, so the text can set the two side by side as separate structures that mourn together, fall together, or are counted togetherLam 2:8Isa 26:1Nam 3:8
marks a spot you can stand on or be caught at, the exposed strip at the foot of the defenses where a siege ramp comes to rest and where dogs are said to eat Jezebel just outside her town2Sa 20:151Ki 21:23
can stretch from the stonework to the sheltered space it rings, so a prayer for peace inside it is a prayer for the people living there rather than for the masonryPsa 122:7
carries a completely different sense in one passage, where the same spelling names a company of exiled Israelites and nothing built at allOba 1:20
Names a town built up for defense. The standard phrase is "fortified city": a real settlement with walls and gates where families live, troops are stationed and a king keeps his officers.Num 32:172Ch 17:192Ki 18:8
Points to defenses people build and repair, and that an enemy can therefore batter down: walls to be strengthened, a siege ramp thrown up against them, high stonework brought to the ground.Nam 3:14Dan 11:15Isa 25:12
Stands for a whole nation's military strength, so the prophets reach for it when they announce that a kingdom's power is about to be laughed at or ruined.Isa 17:3Amo 5:9Hab 1:10
Both
Both name a place people run to when an enemy is loose in the land, chosen because it is harder to reach than open country.Jer 8:14Jer 4:5Jdg 6:2
Both are shown failing. Each is pictured seized or thrown down, so neither the built wall nor the rock ledge finally keeps anyone safe.Lam 2:2Jer 5:17Jer 48:41
Names a rugged natural refuge, a rocky height or mountain hideout, and it keeps company with caves rather than with city walls.Jdg 6:2Isa 33:16Ezk 33:27
Is where a hunted man or a beaten band goes to stay out of reach, so it belongs to stories of flight and hiding rather than to a country's line of defense.1Sa 23:141Sa 23:19Jer 51:30
Is somewhere people simply settle and stay for a season, so a single rocky holdout can become a home and even give a city its name.1Ch 11:7
Ranges across the whole story and the whole map. It names fortified towns in the land the spies scout, in the tribal allotments, in Israel and Judah, and among the nations an invader overruns.Num 13:19Jos 19:352Ki 18:8Hab 1:10
In the prophets it is the standing emblem of the security God himself promises to break. The fortress disappears from Ephraim, the high defenses of a wall are brought down to the dust, and a city's strongholds are fig trees ready to drop into a waiting mouth.Isa 17:3Isa 25:12Nam 3:12Lam 2:2Amo 5:9
It can be said of a person. God tells Jeremiah that he has made him a fortified city, an iron pillar, and walls of bronze against everyone in the land.Jer 1:18
Both
Both stand in the phrase English Bibles render "fortified cities", and Chronicles uses each of them for the same thing: towns in Judah walled and supplied so they can hold out when an army comes.2Ch 17:192Ch 11:102Ch 21:3
Both name what human hands raise rather than what the landscape provides: walls, towers, gates, and bars set around a town, never a cliff or a cave that defends whoever reaches it.Isa 25:122Ch 14:6
Both are the thing an invading army has to take, and both appear at the moment they are taken, whether captured on the way to Jerusalem or laughed at while the enemy piles up a ramp of dirt.Hab 1:102Ch 12:4
It can name the works on the attacker's side. In Isaiah God says he will camp against Jerusalem and raise these works against her, so the same kind of earth and stone that shields a city is heaped up to shut it in.Isa 29:3
Apart from two verses in the prophets it lives entirely in Chronicles, inside that book's notices of what a king built and equipped: commanders posted, stores of food, oil, and wine laid in, provisions handed out to the towns.2Ch 11:112Ch 11:232Ch 14:6
It is what a city under attack is ordered to man. Nahum taunts doomed Nineveh with the command to guard the defenses and watch the road while the destroyer is already coming up against her.Nam 2:1
it can name the defensive works themselves rather than a place where anyone lives: the high walls that get brought down to the dust, the ramparts a besieged people are told to strengthen, the defenses God turns into a heap of rubbleIsa 25:12Nam 3:14Psa 89:40
it is the regular word for what an army wrecks, so it turns up over and over in announcements of ruin: strongholds set on fire, broken down to the ground, laughed at by an invader who simply piles up earth and takes them2Ki 8:12Lam 2:2Hab 1:10Amo 5:9
it can stand for a nation's fighting strength as a whole, something a king plots against or props up with a foreign god, so that losing it means losing the kingdom itselfIsa 17:3Dan 11:24Dan 11:39
its supposed strength is exactly what gets mocked, as when a nation's defenses are pictured as fig trees loaded with early fruit that drop into the eater's mouth at one shakeNam 3:12Jer 48:18
Both
when Hebrew wants to say that a town is fortified it simply adds the stronghold word to the town word, and that pairing is the ordinary expression translated "fortified city"Jos 10:20Jer 8:14
both can name a place people actually live in, which is why the scouts sent into Canaan can ask what the towns are like by asking whether the people live in open camps or in strongholdsNum 13:19Num 32:17
one and the same site can be described with either word: a border list calls Tyre a fortified town, while a later account of the same coast names it simply the stronghold of TyreJos 19:292Sa 24:7
the two are joined to cover every defended post there is, from a lone lookout tower up to the strongest walled place, and set over against the unprotected village out in the open2Ki 18:81Sa 6:18
both are what people run to and rely on when an army is coming, and prophets sweep them away together: the towns of a land cut off and every stronghold thrown down, the defended towns a people trusted in wrecked by the swordMic 5:11Jer 5:17
the pairing also works as a picture of a person made unbreakable, as when God tells his prophet he is being made a fortified town with iron pillars and walls of bronze against the whole landJer 1:18
it is the plain everyday word for a settled place, used with nothing at all said about defenses: a town a man builds and names after his son, or the well outside town where the women come out to draw water toward eveningGen 4:17Gen 24:11Amo 4:8
it can mean the people of a town rather than its buildings: the fifty righteous who might be inside it, the men who gather at its gate, the elders who hear a case, the more than a hundred and twenty thousand who make Nineveh worth sparingGen 18:24Gen 34:20Deu 21:19Jon 4:11
it can carry a public role assigned to a whole community, as with the towns set aside so that someone who has killed by accident can flee there, state his case to the elders at the gate, and be given a place to liveNum 35:11Jos 20:4
it is the word used when a place is called holy or chosen, in titles no fortification word could take: the town of our God, the holy town, the town of David, the town of righteousnessPsa 48:1Neh 11:12Sa 5:7Isa 1:26
mivtsar in the other biblical languages
ὀχύρωμαGreek“stronghold”the Greek word for a stronghold, used in the New Testament as an image of entrenched arguments and mental strongholds the gospel tears down, whereas this word is almost always a literal walled fortification
It names a literal fortified city, the defended strong point of a land, set against open camps and unwalled villages. Scouts and armies sized up a region by whether its towns were fortified or exposed.Num 13:192Ki 3:19Jer 5:17
It is repeatedly the object of siege and judgment: even the mightiest fortifications are thrown down when God brings a nation low, falling as easily as ripe figs shaken from a tree.Nam 3:12Isa 25:12Lam 2:2Amo 5:9
Both
Both name a fortress: a walled, defended strong point built to withstand attack. This military image is the literal core of each word, whether it is spoken of a real city or borrowed as a picture of what must be conquered.Num 13:192Co 10:4
Its one New Testament use is figurative, naming a stronghold of the mind: the entrenched arguments and proud reasonings raised up against the knowledge of God, which God's power tears down. The Hebrew word never carries this inner, spiritual sense.2Co 10:4
What scholars say about mivtsar
The noun derives from the root בצר, "to cut off, make inaccessible," and denotes a fortification or fortified place; the standard lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat it as a single sense applied both attributively in the frequent phrase עִיר מִבְצָר, "fortified city," and absolutely of a fortress or a nation's defenses. In the prophets it is a recurring emblem of the human strength that cannot withstand divine judgment (Amos 5:9;Hosea 10:14;Nahum 3:12-14). Jeremiah 1:18 applies it figuratively to the prophet himself. Jeremiah 6:27 is a textual crux: the received text reads בָּחוֹן ... מִבְצָר, usually taken as calling Jeremiah an assayer and a fortress in continuity with 1:18, though many commentators regard the word there as intrusive or emend the line.
Sources
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. מבצרlexicon
HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. מבצרlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. מבצרlexicon
R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer, B. K. Waltke, eds., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (TWOT), 'בצר'dictionary
William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1 (ICC, 1986)commentary