בִּלְהָה
Bilhah
BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Bilhah’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H1090 appears — 11 distinct verses across 2 books. Click any verse to open its interlinear word-by-word view. Verse text shown in the World English Bible for context — . Each verse’s Hebrew form is shown with its reference; the English is not keyword-highlighted, since the data carries no word-level English alignment. Use “Compare translations” on any verse to read it across multiple English versions. This concordance covers the Hebrew Bible; Septuagint (Greek Old Testament) occurrences are not indexed here.
Genesis 9 verses
- Genesis 29:29 בִּלְהָ֖ה n Proper Laban gave to Rachel his daughter Bilhah, his handmaid, to be her handmaid.
- Genesis 30:3 בִלְהָ֖ה n Proper She said, "Behold, my maid Bilhah. Go in to her, that she may bear on my knees, and I also may obtain children by her."
- Genesis 30:4 בִּלְהָ֥ה n Proper She gave him Bilhah her handmaid as wife, and Jacob went in to her.
- Genesis 30:5 בִּלְהָ֔ה n Proper Bilhah conceived, and bore Jacob a son.
- Genesis 30:7 בִּלְהָ֖ה n Proper Bilhah, Rachel's handmaid, conceived again, and bore Jacob a second son.
- Genesis 35:22 בִּלְהָה֙ n Proper It happened, while Israel lived in that land, that Reuben went and lay with Bilhah, his father's concubine, and Israel heard of it. Now the sons of Jacob were twelve.
- Genesis 35:25 בִלְהָה֙ n Proper The sons of Bilhah (Rachel's handmaid): Dan and Naphtali.
- Genesis 37:2 בִלְהָ֛ה n Proper This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father.
- Genesis 46:25 בִלְהָ֔ה n Proper These are the sons of Bilhah, whom Laban gave to Rachel, his daughter, and these she bore to Jacob: all the souls were seven.
1 Chronicles 2 verses
About this entry
At a glance — auto-summarized from this page’s data, not written by a person. Every figure links to its source below. This summary describes the numbers; it doesn’t interpret them.
בלהה — transliterated Bilhâh — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Bilhah.” Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (82% of all occurrences). Spanning 11 verses in 2 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 29:29. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1090 catalogs a Hebrew word from the Hebrew Old Testament.
These counts are not copied from any lexicon or concordance. They are computed here, from the morphology-tagged Hebrew Old Testament. What Lemma adds →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 11 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 9 verses 82%
- 1 Chronicles 2 verses 18%
By section of the Old Testament
By traditional corpus
Conventional, traditional groupings — biblical authorship is debated, so this is a traditional corpus grouping, not an authorship claim. Each share is this word’s portion of its verses in that division of the Hebrew canon. Each figure is a share of the word’s 11 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 9 verses · 82%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 18%
How translations render this word
Counts come from each version’s own published word-to-Strong’s tagging or interlinear alignment — an approximate guide to how each version renders this word, not a word-level alignment the data otherwise carries. Because each total is that version’s own tagged count, the per-version totals vary from one another and need not match the appearance or distinct-verse counts above. These counts may also differ from a printed concordance because Lemma counts each distinctly tagged rendering and does not collapse phrase taggings into a single head-word total. This is a fixed set of word-tagged versions (KJV, ASV, BSB, ULT) and does not change with the reading translation you choose elsewhere. Each version’s license is shown beside its name below (and on Sources).
- King James Version: Bilhah 11×
- American Standard Version: Bilhah 10×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bilhah 11×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bilhah 11×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1090 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1090 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1090 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1090 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 3 senses BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- Bilhah = "troubled"
- Rachel's handmaid whom she gave to Jacob as a concubine…
- a city in Simeon (noun proper locative)
Word origin
n.pr.f. (etym. dub.) handmaid of Rachel, concubine of Jacob Gn 29:29; 30:3, 4, 5, 7; 35:22, 25 (sons Dan & Naphtali) 37:2 (prob. gloss, Ol) 46:25; 1 Ch 7:13.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בלה (bâlahh) (H1089) — to trouble.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms H1090 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּלְהָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 29:29 | 2 |
| בִלְהָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 46:25 | 1 |
| בִלְהָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:3 | 1 |
| בִלְהָ֛ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 37:2 | 1 |
| בִלְהָֽה | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 7:13 | 1 |
| בִלְהָה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 35:25 | 1 |
| בִּלְהָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:5 | 1 |
| בִּלְהָ֥ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:4 | 1 |
| בִּלְהָה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 35:22 | 1 |
| וּ/בְ/בִלְהָ֥ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 4:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1090, grouped by Strong’s listed origin. These share a root / origin per the lexicon — not necessarily a shared meaning. Each links to that word’s own entry.
Derives from
Shares the same root
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Bilhah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Faltering; bashful, Rachel's handmaid, whom she gave to Jacob (Gen. 29:29). She was the mother of Dan and Naphtali (Gen. 30:3-8). Reuben was cursed by his father for committing adultry with her (35:22; 49:4). He was deprived of the birth-right, which was given to the sons of Joseph.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(timid, bashful), handmaid of Rachel, (Genesis 29:29) and concubine of Jacob, to whom she bore Dan and Naphtali. (Genesis 30:3-8; 35:25; 46:25; 1 Chronicles 7:13) (B.C 53.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
Bilhan, who is old or confused
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 11 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 11 Hebrew verses it occurs in. You can read those verses in Greek by switching the Old Testament edition to the Septuagint.
Read these verses in the Septuagint
This is a verse-level parallel only — the same verses exist in both the Hebrew and Greek Old Testaments. No word-level Hebrew↔Greek correspondence is claimed: the data carries no such alignment, so no Greek word is shown as this Hebrew word’s translation. Coverage is not total — the Septuagint omits the deuterocanon and renumbers the Psalms, so some Hebrew verses have no direct Greek parallel.
