גַּ֫עַל
Gaal
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Gaal’ 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 H1603 appears — 9 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.
Judges 9 verses
- Judges 9:26 גַּ֤עַל n Proper Gaal the son of Ebed came with his brothers, and went over to Shechem; and the men of Shechem put their trust in him.
- Judges 9:28 גַּ֣עַל n Proper Gaal the son of Ebed said, Who is Abimelech, and who is Shechem, that we should serve him? Isn't he the son of Jerubbaal? and Zebul his officer? serve you the men of Hamor the father of Shechem: but why should we serve him?
- Judges 9:30 גַּ֣עַל n Proper When Zebul the ruler of the city heard the words of Gaal the son of Ebed, his anger was kindled.
- Judges 9:31 גַ֨עַל n Proper He sent messengers to Abimelech craftily, saying, Behold, Gaal the son of Ebed and his brothers are come to Shechem; and, behold, they constrain the city [to take part] against you.
- Judges 9:35 גַּ֣עַל n Proper Gaal the son of Ebed went out, and stood in the entrance of the gate of the city: and Abimelech rose up, and the people who were with him, from the ambush.
- Judges 9:36 גַּעַל֮ n Proper When Gaal saw the people, he said to Zebul, Behold, there come people down from the tops of the mountains. Zebul said to him, You see the shadow of the mountains as if they were men.
- Judges 9:37 גַּעַל֮ n Proper Gaal spoke again and said, Behold, there come people down by the middle of the land, and one company comes by the way of the oak of Meonenim.
- Judges 9:39 גַ֔עַל n Proper Gaal went out before the men of Shechem, and fought with Abimelech.
- Judges 9:41 גַּ֥עַל n Proper Abimelech lived at Arumah: and Zebul drove out Gaal and his brothers, that they should not dwell in Shechem.
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.
געל (Gaʻal) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Gaal.” Judges dominates its distribution — 9 of 9 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 9 verses — uncommon. Debuting at Judges 9:26, it then recurs through the corpus. For the data behind this summary, explore 9-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1603 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Judges 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 9 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: Gaal 8×
- American Standard Version: Gaal 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gaal 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gaal 9×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1603 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1603 across 9 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 H1603 across 9 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1603 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 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.
- Gaal = "loathing"
- son of Eved who aided the Shechemites in their rebellion against Abimelech
Word origin
n.pr.m. appar. a Canaanite, son of עֶבֶד (but cf. VB) Ju 9:26, 28, 30, 31, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from געל (gâʻal) (H1602) — to abhor.
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.
גָּעַל
- to be covered with impurity, be loathsome; to loathe. V. preced.
- to remove impurity by means of hot water, to cleanse. Ab. Zar. V, 12 את שדרכו להַגְעִיל יַגְעִיל a vessel which ordinarily is cleansed with hot water, must be purified for ritual purposes by means of hot water. Ib. 76ᵃ כיצד מַגְעִילָן וכ׳ how must one disinfect them? You put a smaller vessel into a larger one &c.; a. fr.—Y. Ter. XI, 48ᵃ מַגְעִילָהּ בחמין removes the soakings of T’rumah &c. [Y. Maasr. I, end, 49ᵇ שיגעיל, read משיעגל, v. עָגַל.] V. הַגְעָלָה.
- to be removed through boiling. Y. Ter. l. c.
- to be soiled. Zeb. 88ᵃ
גְּעַל
- Ithpa. אִתְגָּעַל, Ithpe. אִתְגְּעַל, אִיגְּעַל to be polluted, soiled. Targ. Is. I, 6.—Part. pass. Af. מַגְעַל. Ib. VI, 5; XXVIII, 8.
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 6 distinct written forms H1603 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| גַּ֣עַל | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:28 | 3 |
| גַּעַל֮ | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:36 | 2 |
| גַ֔עַל | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:39 | 1 |
| גַ֨עַל | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:31 | 1 |
| גַּ֤עַל | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:26 | 1 |
| גַּ֥עַל | Noun, Proper | Judges 9:41 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1603, 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.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Gaal). 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
Loathing, the son of Ebed, in whom the Shechemites "placed their confidence" when they became discontented with Abimelech. He headed the revolution, and led out the men of Shechem against Abimelech; but was defeated, and fled to his own home (Judg. 9:26-46). We hear no more of him after this battle.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(contempt), son of Ebed, aided the Shechemites in their rebellion against Abimelech. (Judges 9:1) ... (B.C. 1206.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
contempt; abomination
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
