StrongerBible

tseror

צְרוֹר

HebrewH6872“bundle, bag, ...”

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 42:35 (2×)1Sa 9:11Sa 25:292Sa 17:13Job 14:17Pro 7:20Sng 1:13Amo 9:9Hag 1:6
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradetseh-ROHRnoun

What tseror means

1

a small bag knotted shut, used to carry or store something valuable: silver, spices, anything worth keeping safe

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

Before there were coins, silver moved around as weighed lumps of metal. You could not slip that into a wallet, so people wrapped it in a scrap of cloth and knotted the cloth shut. That knotted little bag is what this word names. It is not the big coarse sack (שַׂק) or the traveling grain sack (אַמְתַּחַת) that carried it: in Genesis the brothers empty out their grain sacks and find the small tied packets of silver sitting inside.

The same small object does several jobs, which is why the picture shifts from verse to verse:

  • a purse of silver a traveler takes on a long journey
  • a worker's pay bag with a hole in it, so the wages leak away
  • a cloth sachet of solid myrrh worn on a cord against the skin

Because the bag is tied and can be sealed with a lump of clay, it also became a natural picture for putting something out of reach. A life can be tied up inside it and kept safe; so can a record of wrongdoing. The force of the image is always the knot. Whatever goes in is not going to fall out, and no one else is going to get at it.

Nuances

1aa bag of silver, knotted shut and carried or stored
Gen 42:35 (2×)Pro 7:20Hag 1:6
1ba small cloth sachet of perfume worn against the body
Sng 1:13
1ca tied bag pictured as the safe place where a life is kept out of an enemy's reach
1Sa 25:29
1Sa 25:29

What the "bundle of the living" in Abigail's speech is, and whether it promises earthly protection or life after death.

  • majorityA purse or pouch in which something precious is tied up and kept safe, so the promise is that God guards David's life on earth. The counting practice behind it is well documented: a sealed clay container from Nuzi held forty eight pebbles matching the forty eight animals listed on its outside, one counter for each living creature, sealed so the tally could not be altered.; A. Leo Oppenheim, "On an Operational Device in Mesopotamian Bureaucracy," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 18, no. 2 (1959): 121-128; Otto Eissfeldt, Der Beutel der Lebendigen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960); Eric Peels, "צְרוֹר," Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database
  • minorityA tied and sealed document, that is, a register of the living comparable to the book of life in Psalm 69:28.; N. H. Tur-Sinai, reported in David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007)
1da tied bag pictured as the place where a wrong is sealed up and stored away
Job 14:17
2

a pebble: a small loose stone, small enough to stand for the last scrap of anything

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyContested

This is the word at its smallest and hardest. When Hushai boasts that all Israel will rope a town and drag it down into the valley until not even one of these is left there, the point is total demolition: not a scrap of the place will remain. When Amos pictures God shaking Israel among the nations the way grain is shaken in a sieve, not one of these falls to the ground.

Many scholars think this is not really the same word as the little tied bag at all, but a separate word that only looks the same, belonging with the ordinary words for a stone (אֶבֶן) and for solid rock (צוּר). It is kept apart here for that reason, though some reference works still list the two together under one heading.

2Sa 17:13Amo 9:9
Amo 9:9

Whether the word in the sieve image means a pebble caught in the mesh or a kernel of good grain that does not slip through.

  • majorityA pebble: the sieve holds back stones and rubbish, so the picture is judgment, and no worthless thing escapes it. The clear use of the word for a small stone in 2 Samuel 17:13 supports this, as does the Latin rendering "lapillus."; Shalom M. Paul, Amos, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos, Anchor Bible 24A (New York: Doubleday, 1989); Göran Eidevall, Amos, Anchor Yale Bible 24G (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)
  • minorityA kernel of good grain that does not fall through and be lost, making the sieve an image of a remnant preserved.; Gary V. Smith, Amos: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989)
3

Zeror: a man named among the forefathers of King Saul

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

In the short family list that opens the story of Saul, this is simply a name: Kish son of Abiel son of Zeror. Hebrew names were very often ordinary words, and this one is spelled exactly like the word for a little tied bag, so it may have begun as a nickname. The text says nothing about him beyond his place in the line, and he never appears again.

1Sa 9:1

What scholars say about tseror

The lexicons agree on the base sense. BDB glosses "bundle, parcel, pouch (purse) of money, bag"; HALOT gives "Säckchen, Beutel"; the noun derives transparently from צרר I "to bind, tie up, wrap," matching the pre-coinage practice of wrapping weighed silver in cloth (the verb is used of exactly this in Deuteronomy 14:25). Cognates across Semitic support it: Syriac ṣrārā, Jewish Aramaic ṣĕrārā "money bag, purse," Mandaic ṣraria "Geldbeutel," and Classical Arabic ṣurra, used both of a money purse and of a small sachet for gold dust, drugs and spices, an exact parallel to the myrrh sachet of Song 1:13. The Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database entry (Eric Peels) counts only seven occurrences of the "pouch" lemma, deliberately setting aside 1 Samuel 9:1, 2 Samuel 17:13 and Amos 9:9 as apparently different meanings; Gesenius files the "stone" sense as equivalent to צוּר. The ancient versions confirm the split: the Septuagint has δεσμός at Genesis 42:35, 1 Samuel 25:29, Haggai 1:6 and Proverbs 7:20, ἀπόδεσμος at Song 1:13, βαλλάντιον at Job 14:17, but σύντριμμα at Amos 9:9, where the Greek also reads a winnowing rather than a sieve; the Vulgate has sacculum, fasciculus, and lapillus at Amos 9:9. For 1 Samuel 25:29 the Mesopotamian background is decisive for most: Oppenheim published a hollow egg-shaped tablet from Nuzi (HSS XVI 449) containing 48 pebbles matching the 48 animals itemized in its inscription, each pebble a counter for one living animal, sealed so the count could not be altered; Eissfeldt built his reading of Abigail's phrase on it, and Shalom Paul traced the wider heavenly-tablets and book-of-life tradition behind it. Fokkelman stressed the antithetical structure of the verse (bound into a pouch against slung out of a sling), which tells against Tur-Sinai's sealed-document proposal, as Peels also argues on the ground that the verb is nowhere used of tying a document. The eschatological sense is demonstrably secondary: Ben Sira 6:16 and the Hodayot from Qumran use the phrase of earthly deliverance, while the Targum of Samuel and b. Shabbat 152b give it the afterlife reading that produced the epitaph formula documented by van der Horst (CIJ 661, Tortosa). Marmorstein's amulet proposal for 1 Samuel 25:29 is reported and rejected by Fabry in TDOT and by Peels.

Where scholars disagree about tseror

Whether the pouch sense and the pebble sense belong to one word with a wide range, or to two separate words that happen to be spelled alike.

  • majorityTwo separate words. The pouch word comes straight from the verb for binding and tying, while the small-stone word belongs with the family of words for rock and flint, so the stone passages should be filed apart from the pouch lemma altogether.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. צְרוֹר; Eric Peels, "צְרוֹר," Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database
  • minorityOne word with a wide range, listed as two senses under a single heading, since the derivation of the stone sense from the rock family is itself uncertain.; Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. צְרוֹר; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), s.v. צְרוֹר
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Francis Brown, S. R. Driver and Charles A. Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. צְרוֹרlexicon
  • Ludwig Koehler and Walter Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. צְרוֹרlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. צְרוֹרlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993-2011), s.v. צְרוֹרlexicon
  • Eric Peels, "צְרוֹר," Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Databasedatabase
  • Hans-Josef Fabry, "צָרַר," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgrentheological-dictionary
  • A. Leo Oppenheim, "On an Operational Device in Mesopotamian Bureaucracy," Journal of Near Eastern Studies 18, no. 2 (1959): 121-128journal-article
  • Otto Eissfeldt, Der Beutel der Lebendigen (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1960)monograph
  • Shalom M. Paul, "Heavenly Tablets and the Book of Life," Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 5 (1973): 345-353journal-article
  • J. P. Fokkelman, Narrative Art and Poetry in the Books of Samuel (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1981-1993)monograph
  • David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007)commentary
  • Shalom M. Paul, Amos, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991)commentary
  • Hans Walter Wolff, Joel and Amos, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977)commentary
  • Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, Amos, Anchor Bible 24A (New York: Doubleday, 1989)commentary
  • Göran Eidevall, Amos, Anchor Yale Bible 24G (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)commentary
  • Gary V. Smith, Amos: A Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989)commentary
  • Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs, Anchor Bible 7C (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977)commentary
  • Othmar Keel, The Song of Songs, Continental Commentaries (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994)commentary
  • Raphael Loewe, "The Earliest Biblical Allusion to Coined Money?" Palestine Exploration Quarterly 87 (1955)journal-article
  • Pieter W. van der Horst, Ancient Jewish Epitaphs (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1991)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of צְרוֹר

m s absolute

צְרוֹר

2Sa 17:13, Job 14:17, Amo 9:9, Hag 1:6

m s construct

צְרוֹר

Gen 42:35, 1Sa 25:29, Pro 7:20, Sng 1:13

f p construct

צְרֹרוֹת

Gen 42:35

m

צְרוֹר

1Sa 9:1