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דְּלִילָה

Delilah

BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Delilah’ fuller range ↓

H1807 Strong's Hebrew
Dᵉlîylâh Transliteration
/del-ee-law'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 6 appearances

Compare with another word →

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, דלילה (Dᵉlîylâh) means “Delilah.” The word gravitates to Judges (100%). It turns up in 6 verses across 1 book, an uncommon footprint. It first appears in Judges 16:4. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Delilah
Modern gloss
Delilah
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H1807 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.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Judges 16:4
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Judges 16:4.
Judges 16:18
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Judges 16:18.
#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 →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 6 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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) 6 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: Delilah 5×
  • American Standard Version: Delilah 5×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Delilah 5×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Delilah 5×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H1807 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Delilah” 5×

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 H1807 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Delilah” 5×

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 H1807 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Delilah” 5×

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 H1807 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Delilah” 5×

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 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.

  1. Delilah = "feeble"
  2. the Philistine mistress of Samson who betrayed the secret of his great strength…

Word origin

n.pr.f. Delila, Philistine woman, mistress of Samson Ju 16:4, 6, 10, 12, 13, 18.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from דלל (dâlal) (H1809) — to hang.

Part of speech: Proper Name Feminine


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.

לַיְלָה

  • , v. לַיִל

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 5 distinct written forms H1807 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
דְּלִילָה֙ Noun, Proper Judges 16:6 2
דְלִילָ֗ה Noun, Proper Judges 16:18 1
דְּלִילָ֜ה Noun, Proper Judges 16:13 1
דְּלִילָֽה Noun, Proper Judges 16:4 1
דְּלִילָה֩ Noun, Proper Judges 16:12 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1807, 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 (Delilah). 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

Languishing, a Philistine woman who dwelt in the valley of Sorek (Judg. 16:4-20). She was bribed by the "lords of the Philistines" to obtain from Samson the secret of his strength and the means of overcoming it (Judg. 16:4-18). She tried on three occasions to obtain from him this secret in vain. On the fourth occasion she wrung it from him. She made him sleep upon her knees, and then called the man who was waiting to help her; who "cut off the seven locks of his head," and so his "strength went from him." (See SAMSON.)

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

poor; small; head of hair

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.