דִּבָּה
slander
‘slander’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1681 appears in the Book of Numbers — 3 distinct verses. 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.
Numbers
- Numbers 13:32 דִּבַּ֤ת n c fs cs They brought up an evil report of the land which they had spied out to the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eats up the inhabitants of it; and all the people who we saw in it are men of great stature.
- Numbers 14:36 דִבָּ֖ה n c fs The men, whom Moses sent to spy out the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up an evil report against the land,
- Numbers 14:37 דִבַּת n c fs cs even those men who did bring up an evil report of the land, died by the plague before Yahweh.
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.
דבה (dibbâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “slander.” It is not a single-sense word — see its full sense range. With 9 verses in 6 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Numbers, which alone accounts for 33% of its uses. Debuting at Genesis 37:2, it then recurs through the corpus. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1681 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.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 44%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 33%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 22%
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: Slander 3×, Report 2×
- American Standard Version: Defaming 2×, Evil report 2×, Report 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Slander 3×, Bad report 2×, Report 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bad report 2×, Whispering of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1681 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1681 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H1681 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 H1681 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 3 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. whispering ψ 31:14; Je 20:10 (Hi Hup De Gf VB; yet cf. Che ψ) e.g. Psalms 31:14
- 2. defamation Pr 10:18 (c. הוציא). e.g. Proverbs 10:18
- 3. evil report, specif. a (true) report of evil doing Gn 37:2 (P) וַיָּבֵא אֶת־דִּבָּתָם רָעָה; cf. also Pr 25:10 & Ez 36:3 וַתֵּֽעֲלוּ עַל־שְׂפֵת לָשׁוֹן וְדִבַּת־עָ֑ם. unfavourable report of spies Nu 13:32; 14:36, 37 (all P & all c. תוֹצִיא; adj. רעה only 14:37). e.g. Genesis 37:2
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.f. whispering, defamation, evil report (? as that which glides stealthily)—abs. ד׳ Nu 14:36; Pr 10:18; cstr. דִּבַּת Je 20:10 + 4 times; sf. דִּבָּֽתְךָ Pr 25:10 דִּבָּתָם Gn 37:2;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דבב (dâbab) (H1680) — to glide.
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.
דִּבָּה
- evil report, calumny.—Trnsf. an ill-reputed woman. Pes. 87ᵇ (play on Diblayim, Hos. I, 3) ד׳ רעה בת ד׳ וכ׳ an ill-reputed woman daughter of &c.; cmp. דּוּמָה I. e.g. Hosea 1:3
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 9 distinct written forms H1681 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| דִ֝בָּ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 10:18 | 1 |
| דִבַּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 14:37 | 1 |
| דִבָּ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 14:36 | 1 |
| דִּבַּ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 20:10 | 1 |
| דִּבַּ֤ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Numbers 13:32 | 1 |
| דִּבַּ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 31:13 | 1 |
| דִּבָּתָ֥/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Genesis 37:2 | 1 |
| וְ/דִבַּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 36:3 | 1 |
| וְ֝/דִבָּתְ/ךָ֗ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 25:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1681, 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 8 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.
