וַיַּעֲבֵ֥ר יִשַׁ֖י שַׁמָּ֑ה וַיֹּ֕אמֶר גַּם בָּזֶ֖ה לֹא בָחַ֥ר יְהוָֽה
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. He said, Neither has Yahweh chosen this.
World English Bible · Public Domain
1 Samuel 16:9
Hebrew (Westminster Leningrad Codex) 1 Samuel 16:9 appears in the Hebrew Old Testament. The text above is from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. Each word links to its Strong’s number, a concise gloss, and parsing drawn from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible morphology. Click any word for its full Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) entry.
English Translation
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. He said, Neither has Yahweh chosen this.
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Compare translations 3
The same verse in 3 English versions, stacked beneath the original-language interlinear above. Click any original word for its lexicon entry.
Each is an independent rendering of the whole verse — the interlinear is not word-aligned to these translations.
Highlighted words mark where these versions differ — a whole-verse word diff, not a word-by-word alignment.
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World English Bible Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. He said, Neither has Yahweh chosen this.
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King James Version Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath the LORD chosen this.
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unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Then Jesse made Shammah pass over, but he said, “Yahweh has also not chosen this.”
unfoldingWord Literal Text — © unfoldingWord, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Word-aligned USFM3 via Door43 (git.door43.org/unfoldingWord/en_ult).
Show all 18 translations
Every available English version of this verse, each an independent rendering of the whole verse.
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World English Bible Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. He said, Neither has Yahweh chosen this.
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Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Next Jesse presented Shammah, but Samuel said, “The LORD has not chosen this one either.”
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Majority Standard Bible Public Domain
Next Jesse presented Shammah, but Samuel said, “The LORD has not chosen this one either.”
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King James Version Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath the LORD chosen this.
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American Standard Version (1901) Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath Jehovah chosen this.
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Revised Version (1885) Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath the LORD chosen this.
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Geneva Bible (1599) Public Domain
Then Ishai made Shammah come. And he said, Neither yet hath the Lord chosen him.
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Douay-Rheims (1899) Public Domain
And Isai brought Samma, and he said of him: Neither hath the Lord chosen this.
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Young's Literal Translation Public Domain
And Jesse causeth Shammah to pass by, and he saith, `Also on this Jehovah hath not fixed.'
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Literal Standard Version CC BY-SA 4.0
And Jesse causes Shammah to pass by, and he says, “Indeed, YHWH has not fixed on this [one].”
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Unlocked Literal Bible CC BY-SA 4.0
Jesse then made Shammah pass by, but Samuel said, “Neither has Yahweh chosen this one.”
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unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Then Jesse made Shammah pass over, but he said, “Yahweh has also not chosen this.”
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Darby Bible Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, Neither has Jehovah chosen this one.
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World Messianic Bible Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. He said, “The LORD has not chosen this one, either.”
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Webster's Bible Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said, Neither hath the LORD chosen this.
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Free Bible Version CC BY-SA 4.0
Then Jesse had Shammah come forward. But Samuel said, “The Lord hasn't chosen this one either.”
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Bible in Basic English Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah come before him. And he said, The Lord has not taken this one.
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JPS Tanakh (1917) Public Domain
Then Jesse made Shammah to pass by. And he said: 'Neither hath the LORD chosen this.'
Literal Standard Version (2020), Covenant Press — licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API (eBible.org). Unlocked Literal Bible (unfoldingWord) — licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API (eBible.org). unfoldingWord Literal Text — © unfoldingWord, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Word-aligned USFM3 via Door43 (git.door43.org/unfoldingWord/en_ult). Free Bible Version, Dr. Jonathan Gallagher — licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Text via the HelloAO Bible API (eBible.org).
Word by word
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שַׁמָּ֑ה
Shammâh
H8048
“Shammah”
Noun, Proper
- Appears 7× in the Hebrew Bible
- First appears at Genesis 36:13
- Part of Speech
- Noun
- Type
- Proper
Full BDB Definition
Shammah = "astonishment"
- son of Reuel, grandson of Esau, and a chief of Edom
- the 3rd son of Jesse and a brother of David
- son of Agee the Hararite and one of the 30 of David's mighty warriors
- the Harodite, one of the 30 of David's mighty warriors
- another Hararite, one of the 30 of David's mighty warriors
- וַיַּעֲבֵ֥ר ʻâbar H5674 “and · to pass over” Conjunction + Verb, Hiphil, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular
- יִשַׁ֖י Yishay H3448 “Jesse” Noun, Proper
- שַׁמָּ֑ה Shammâh H8048 “Shammah” Noun, Proper
- וַיֹּ֕אמֶר ʼâmar H559 “and · to say” Conjunction + Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular
- גַּם gam H1571 “also” Particle, Accusative
- בָּזֶ֖ה zeh H2088 “in/at · this” Preposition + Pronoun, Demonstrative, Masculine, Singular
- לֹא lôʼ H3808 “not” Particle, Negative
- בָחַ֥ר bâchar H977 “to choose” Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular
- יְהוָֽה Yᵉhôvâh H3068 “LORD” Noun, Proper
About this verse
These counts appear in no published source. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged text and Lemma’s own curated glosses. What Lemma adds →
- 9
- words
- 9
- distinct lemmas
- Historical
- section
Notable vocabulary
The rarest word here is שַׁמָּ֑ה Shammah H8048 — appearing just 7 times in the whole Hebrew Bible.
Shared distinctive vocabulary
שַׁמָּ֑ה Shammah H8048 occurs in 7 verses of the Hebrew Bible. Also found in:
Grammatical profile
- 3 verbs
- 3 nouns
- 1 pronoun
- 2 particles
Verb forms
- וַיַּעֲבֵ֥ר Hiphil · Sequential Imperfect
- וַיֹּ֕אמֶר Qal · Sequential Imperfect
- בָחַ֥ר Qal · Perfect
Hebrew & Septuagint length
In English translation the verse runs 14 words from the Hebrew and 16 from the Septuagint (LXX English) — closely comparable.
A rough comparison of the two English renderings, which tokenize alike — not a word-level alignment.
Word counts can differ between the Hebrew and the Greek without any difference in meaning — e.g. the Hebrew direct-object marker אֵת has no separate Greek word, and Greek often adds the article ὁ.
In the original languages it is 9 Hebrew tokens and 13 Greek tokens — but the two are counted differently (Hebrew bundles its prefixes and suffixes into one token; the Greek is in lemma form), so that isn’t a like-for-like length.
Cross-references
3Topical passages linked to 1 Samuel 16:9 in the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge — connected by theme and wording, ordered by reader-vote popularity; previews shown in the World English Bible.
- 1 Samuel 17:13 The three eldest sons of Jesse had gone after Saul to the battle: and the names of his three sons who went to the battle were Eliab the firstborn, and next to him Abinadab, and the third Shammah.
- 2 Samuel 13:3 But Amnon had a friend, whose name was Jonadab, the son of Shimeah, David's brother; and Jonadab was a very subtle man.
- 1 Chronicles 2:13 and Jesse became the father of his firstborn Eliab, and Abinadab the second, and Shimea the third,
Cross-references courtesy of OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0).
Hebrew and Greek witnesses Masoretic Hebrew ↔ Greek Septuagint
The same verse in the two great witnesses to the Old Testament, shown verse-for-verse.
These are two independent witnesses, not word-aligned to each other, and the Septuagint is shown in lemma (dictionary) form.
καί παραἄγω ιεσσαι ὁ σαμα καί εἶπον καί ἐν οὗτος οὐ ἐκλέγω κύριος
And Jessae caused Sama to pass by: and he said, Neither has God chosen this one.
LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) · Public Domain
Hebrew: Westminster Leningrad Codex (CC BY 4.0). Greek: Septuagint (public domain); English from LXX2012 (modern English Septuagint) (Public Domain). How the Septuagint differs from the Hebrew →
Targum (Aramaic paraphrase)
The Targum is the ancient Jewish Aramaic paraphrase of the Hebrew Scriptures — an interpretive translation, not the Hebrew text itself. Onkelos (literal) and Pseudo-Jonathan (expansive) render the Torah, and Jonathan the Prophets. Coverage is partial: where no permissively-licensed English translation exists for a verse, only the Aramaic is shown. This is verse-level text, not a word-by-word alignment to the Hebrew.
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Targum Jonathan Prophets (Joshua–Malachi)
וְאַעֲבַר יִשַׁי שַׁמָה וַאֲמַר אַף בְּדֵין לָא רַעֲוָא קֳדָם יְיָ:
(no public-domain English translation for this verse)
Targum Jonathan — Aramaic: “Mikraot Gedolot” (public domain). English: “Sefaria Community Translation” (CC0 1.0 (public-domain dedication)); “London "Chaldee Paraphrase," 1871” (public domain). Text via Sefaria.
Lesson kit
Teaching starters — assembled from the data on this page, not authored interpretation. Every prompt links to the verse data it draws on. Edit before teaching.
1 Samuel, in the Historical, opens this verse with 9 words (9 distinct Hebrew lemmas). Its most distinctive word is Shammâh (“Shammah”). A historical commentator’s framing appears above. Read the whole chapter for the surrounding context.
Discussion questions
- What does “Shammah” (Shammâh) contribute to the verse as a whole?
- Genesis 36:13 shares the word «Shammah» with this verse. How do the two illuminate each other?
- The translations on this page render this verse differently — a whole-verse word diff, not a word-by-word alignment. What might account for the different wordings?
- The verb «וַיַּעֲבֵ֥ר» is Hiphil Sequential Imperfect. How does its form color the action?
- Reading how Trapp's Complete Commentary and The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges read this verse, where do the two commentators agree and where do they part?
Things to notice
- This verse counts 9 Hebrew ↔ 13 Greek words.
- These translations choose different wording for 6 words in this verse.
- 9 distinct Hebrew lemmas span 9 words in this verse.
Commentary
Notes on 1 Samuel 16:9 from classic Christian and Jewish commentators (each source and its license shown beneath its notes). The classic Christian expositions comment on the surrounding passage and are grouped to its opening verse, so a note may address several verses; the Jewish commentaries on the Tanakh (Rashi and others) are per-verse, so they appear only where the commentator wrote on this verse.
Lemma curates 59 commentaries, every one of them public domain or Creative Commons licensed, each selected and text-cleaned for this edition rather than reprinted as found. About our sources →
Trapp's Complete Commentary
John Trapp
John Trapp, A Commentary or Exposition upon All the Books of the Old and New Testament (1647–1656) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges
gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne
The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges (gen. ed. J. J. S. Perowne; Cambridge University Press, 1878–1918) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword module.
John Gill's Exposition
John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible (1746–1763) — public domain (CC PDM 1.0). Text via the HelloAO Bible API.
Matthew Poole's English Annotations
Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible (1683–1685) — public domain. Text from a community e-Sword/MySword module.
Rashi
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzchaki (Rashi)
Rashi on the Tanakh — English translations: “The Judaica Press complete Tanach with Rashi, translated by A. J. Rosenberg” (CC BY 4.0); “Pentateuch with Rashi's commentary by M. Rosenbaum and A.M. Silbermann, 1929-1934” (public domain); “The Metsudah Tanach series, Lakewood, N.J” (CC BY 4.0); and “The Book of Joshua, Metsudah Publications, 1997” (CC BY 4.0). Text via Sefaria.