בַּעֲלָה
mistress
‘mistress’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1172 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
1 Samuel 1 verse
1 Kings 1 verse
Nahum 1 verse
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.
“mistress” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun בעלה (baʻălâh). With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in 1 Samuel. First canonically at 1 Samuel 28:7, it enters the text early. Carrying more than one sense, it rewards its full sense range. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1172 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 100%
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: Hath 2×, Mistress 2×
- American Standard Version: Mistress 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is 1×, Mistress 1×, Owned 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Mistress of 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1172 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1172 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1172 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1172 across 4 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.
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. mistress, בַּעֲלַת הַבַּיִת mistress of the house 1 K 17:17. e.g. 1 Kings 17:17
- 2. n. rel. ב׳ אוב necromancer 1 S 28:7(×2); ב׳ כשׁפים sorceress, Na 3:4. e.g. 1 Samuel 28:7
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.pr.loc. Jos 15:9, 10, 11, 29 1 Ch 13:6 = קִרְיַת בַּעַל Jos 15:60; 18:14 (city of Baal, from a high place of Baal there) = בַּעֲלֵי יְהוּדָה 2 S 6:2 (We Dr read בעל; י added by dittogr.; so-called as seat of Baal-worship in Judah, in distinct. from like places elsewhere) = קִרְיַת יְעָרִים Jos 9:17 v. 15:9 1 Ch 13:6; a city of Judah;? Kirjat elʿEnab RobBR ii. 11 TristrTpg..
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from בעל (baʻal) (H1167) — husband.
Jastrow Dictionary
A second Hebrew/Aramaic lexicon for comparison, covering Aramaic and post-biblical (Talmudic, Targumic, Midrashic) usage that the biblical-Hebrew BDB does not. Matched by lemma rather than by Strong’s number, so a lemma may carry more than one Jastrow headword (shown separately below), and the entries cover usage well beyond the Bible.
בַּעֲלָה
- (preced.) mistress, owner &c. Gen. R. s. 52 (rendering בְּעֻלַת, Gen. XX, 3, as though בּעֲלַת) מרתא דבעלה her husband’s mistress.—Compounds are mostly self-evident, e.g. בעלת הגט the woman receiving the letter of divorce;—ב׳ איברים an animal of large build. Ber. 32ᵃ; v. בַּעַל. e.g. Genesis 20:3
A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (Marcus Jastrow; London, Luzac, 1903) — Public Domain. Digitized via Sefaria. Digitized via Sefaria. Full attribution on Sources.
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms H1172 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּעֲלַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Kings 17:17 | 2 |
| בַּֽעֲלַת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 28:7 | 1 |
| בַּעֲלַת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 28:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1172, 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.
- בעל Baʻal H1168 Baal
- בעל המון Baʻal Hâmôwn H1174 Baal-hamon
- בעל חנן Baʻal Chânân H1177 Baal-hanan
- בעל חצור Baʻal Châtsôwr H1178 Baal-hazor
- בעל חרמון Baʻal Chermôwn H1179 Baal-hermon
- בעלי Baʻălîy H1180 Baali
- בעליה Bᵉʻalyâh H1183 Bealiah
- בעלי יהודה Baʻălêy Yᵉhûwdâh H1184 Baale-Judah
- בעל פרצים Baʻal Pᵉrâtsîym H1188 Baal-perazim
- בעל תמר Baʻal Tâmâr H1193 Baal-tamar
- בעלה Baʻălâh H1173 Baalah
- בעלות Bᵉʻâlôwth H1175 Baalath
- בעלת Baʻălâth H1191 Baalath
- בעלת באר Baʻălath Bᵉʼêr H1192 Baalath-beer
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 17 — not the complete family. 14 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
