גָּלַע
to expose
‘to expose’ is one of 3 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hithpael
- The reflexive or reciprocal stem (the subject acts on itself).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hithpael, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (67%)
- Verb, Hithpael, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1566 appears — 3 distinct verses 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.
Proverbs 3 verses
- Proverbs 17:14 הִ֝תְגַּלַּ֗ע Hithpael pf 3ms The beginning of strife is like breaching a dam, Therefore stop contention before quarreling breaks out.
- Proverbs 18:1 יִתְגַּלָּֽע Hithpael impf 3ms An unfriendly man pursues selfishness, And defies all sound judgment.
- Proverbs 20:3 יִתְגַּלָּֽע Hithpael impf 3ms It is an honor for a man to keep aloof from strife; But every fool will be quarreling.
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.
The Hebrew verb גלע centers on the idea of “to expose.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Proverbs (100%). First canonically at Proverbs 17:14, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1566 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Proverbs 3 verses 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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Be meddled 1×, Intermeddleth 1×, Will be meddling 1×
- American Standard Version: Is quarrelling 1×, Rageth 1×, Will be quarrelling 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Breaks out 1×, He rebels 1×, Will quarrel 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Breaks out 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1566 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1566 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1566 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1566 across 3 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 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.
- to expose, lay bare
(Hithpael)
- to disclose oneself, break out
- to break out (in contention)
Word origin
[ גָּלַע ] vb. expose, lay bare —only Hithp. disclose oneself, break out
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
גָּלַע
- to scratch off, rub; lay open.
- to be opened through rubbing or scratching, to bleed. Nidd. VIII, 2 (58ᵇ) והיא יכולה להִגָּלֵעַ וכ׳ (Bart. להתגלע) and it (the wound) may have been bruised so as to bleed.
- (with ב of person) to detract from, lay bare the ignorance of, attack. Y. Yeb. VIII, end, 9ᵈ משום שלא לגְרוֹעַ בו וכ׳ (did they send him off) in order not to see him exposed, or because he was not fit (to argue)? What is the difference? היה דרכו לגַלֵּע א"ת משום שלא לגלע בו וכ׳ It was his (Rabbi’s) habit to begin with vehement argument; now, if you were to say, ‘in order not to see him exposed’, his exposure was in his own hand (he being the attacking part) &c. Ib. מה היה לו לגַ׳ בו what could he have attacked (on that subject of androgynos)?
- , Nithpa. נִתְגַּלֵּעַ
- 1. to be scratched open, v. supra.
- 2. to be laid bare, be argued. Snh. 6ᵇ; Y. ib. I, 18ᵇ (ref. to Prov. XVII, 14) (עד שלא נתג׳) קודם שנתג׳ הריב נטוש before the case of litigation has been laid open (fully argued), you (the judge) may compromise it &c.; Tanḥ. Mishp. 6; Yalk. Prov. 956 נִתְגַּלֶּה, יִתְגַּלֶּה). e.g. Proverbs 17:14
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 2 distinct written forms H1566 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִתְגַּלָּֽע | Verb, Hithpael, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 18:1 | 2 |
| הִ֝תְגַּלַּ֗ע | Verb, Hithpael, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 17:14 | 1 |
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.
