גְּבִירָה
queen
‘queen’ 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
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1377 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 11:19 הַ/גְּבִירָֽה ptcl def.art + n c fs Hadad found great favor in the sight of Pharaoh, so that he gave him as wife the sister of his own wife, the sister of Tahpenes the queen.
- 1 Kings 15:13 מִ/גְּבִירָ֔ה prep + n c fs Also Maacah his mother he removed from being queen, because she had made an abominable image for an Asherah; and Asa cut down her image, and burnt it at the brook Kidron.
2 Kings 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 13:18 וְ/לַ/גְּבִירָ֖ה conj + prep det + n c fs Say you to the king and to the queen-mother, Humble yourselves, sit down; for your headdresses are come down, even the crown of your glory.
- Jeremiah 29:2 וְ/הַ/גְּבִירָ֨ה conj + ptcl def.art + n c fs (after that Jeconiah the king, and the queen-mother, and the eunuchs, [and] the princes of Judah and Jerusalem, and the craftsmen, and the smiths, were departed from Jerusalem),
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.
At its core, גבירה (gᵉbîyrâh) means “queen.” Scripture first uses it in 1 Kings 11:19. Spanning 6 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in 1 Kings (33% of all occurrences). Carrying more than one sense, it rewards its full sense range. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1377 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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: Queen 4×, Being queen 2×
- American Standard Version: Being queen 2×, Queen 2×, Queen-mother 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Queen mother 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Queen mother 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1377 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1377 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1377 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1377 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear 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. lady, queen
- 2. queen-mother
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
Derived from גביר (gᵉbîyr) (H1376) — lord.
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.
גְּבִירָה
- mistress, lady. Sot. 12ᵇ; Ex. R. s. 1 גְּבִירְתֵּנוּ O our mistress! Taan. 21ᵇ (of Palestine, opp. שפחה Babylonia). Y. Ber. III, 6ᶜ; a. e.—Pl. גְּבִירוֹת. Ex. R. l. c.; Tanḥ. Sh’moth 3 בני ג׳ the sons of the ladies (Leah and Rachel). V. גְּבֶרֶת.
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 4 distinct written forms H1377 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/גְּבִירָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 11:19 | 2 |
| מִ/גְּבִירָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 15:13 | 2 |
| וְ/הַ/גְּבִירָ֨ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 29:2 | 1 |
| וְ/לַ/גְּבִירָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 13:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1377, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
