גִּלֲלַי
Levitical musician
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 H1562 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Nehemiah 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.
“Levitical musician” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name גללי (Gilălay). A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Nehemiah, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. It occurs only once, in Nehemiah 12:36. See 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1562 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Nehemiah 1 verse 100%
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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Gilalai 1×
- American Standard Version: Gilalai 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gilalai 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gilalai 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1562 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1562 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1562 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1562 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- a Levitical musician, one of the priest's sons at the consecration of the wall of Jerusalem
Word origin
גִּלֲלִי n.pr.m. a Levitical musician Ne 12:36.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from גלל (gêlel) (H1561) — dung.
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.
גְּלָל
- 1. untrimmed stone, cobble (v. גְּוִיל). [Ezra V, 8.]—Ḥull. 63ᵃ אתא ג׳ a stone fell (from on high); Yalk. Zech. 578 גלאלא. Gitt. 47ᵃ Ar. (ed. גַּלְגַּלְתָּא). Ab. Zar. 22ᵇ, v. דַּגָּלָא. e.g. Ezra 5:8
- 2. lump.—Pl. גְּלָלֵי. Ḥull. 112ᵃ bot. תרי ג׳ דמלחא Rashi (ed. ג׳ מלחא) two lumps of salt.
- 3. ordure, v. גַּלָּא.—Pl. as supra. B. Kam. 92ᵇ (prov.) a dog in his hunger ג׳ מבלע (Ms. H. sing.) will swallow excrements (Rashi: stones).
- 4. wave, v. גַּלָּא.
- 5. consequence; בג׳ on account of, in order to. Targ. Ps. XL, 12 (Ms. ג׳ היכנא). Targ. II Chr. XXIV, 25; a. e.
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.
