דָּלַל
to hang
also: languish, hang down, be low 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
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘hang’
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 4 times (44%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (11%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural 1 time (11%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 9 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1809 appears — 9 distinct verses across 5 books. 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 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Psalms 3 verses
- Psalms 79:8 דַלּ֣וֹנוּ Qal pf 1cp Don't hold the iniquities of our forefathers against us. Let your tender mercies speedily meet us, For we are in desperate need.
- Psalms 116:6 דַּ֝לּוֹתִ֗י Qal pf 1cs Yahweh preserves the simple. I was brought low, and he saved me.
- Psalms 142:6 דַלּ֪וֹתִ֫י Qal pf 1cs Listen to my cry, For I am in desperate need. Deliver me from my persecutors, For they are stronger than me.
Proverbs 1 verse
Isaiah 3 verses
- Isaiah 17:4 יִדַּ֖ל Qal impf 3ms It shall happen in that day, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean.
- Isaiah 19:6 דָּלֲל֥וּ Qal pf 3cp The rivers shall become foul; the streams of Egypt shall be diminished and dried up; the reeds and flags shall wither away.
- Isaiah 38:14 דַּלּ֤וּ Qal pf 3cp Like a swallow [or] a crane, so did I chatter; I did moan as a dove; my eyes fail [with looking] upward: Lord, I am oppressed, be my collateral.
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, דלל (dâlal) means “to hang.” Scripture first uses it in Judges 6:6. Spanning 9 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Psalms (33% of all occurrences). The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Niphal. See the sense tree, 9-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1809 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.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 56%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 44%
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: Low 2×
- American Standard Version: Low 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Grow weak 1×, Hanging limp 1×, He dangles 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Low 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1809 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H1809 across 11 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1809 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1809 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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 2 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.
Qal
- hang, ‘depend’
Niphal
- . be brought low, laid low
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
[ דָּלַל ] vb. hang, be low, languish
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דלה (dâlâh) (H1802) — to draw.
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.
דָּלַל
- (b. h.) [to be thin, swing, hang,] to be poor. Lev. R. s. 34 דַּלּוּ מן המצות they became poor in good deeds.
- 1. to thin, to take off grapes, or take out plants in order to give the remainder more room. Peah III, 3 המֵדַל (Y. ed. המֵידַל) he who thins the vineyard; Tosef. ib. I, 10. Peah VII, 5; a. fr.—M. Kat. 4ᵃ sq. (a Boraitha quoted by Rabina) והתניא מְדַלִּין לירקות וכ׳ (v. דָּלָה) are we not told, you may irrigate the vegetable garden during the festive week, if you intend to use the vegetables during the festive days? Said Rabbah to him [read:] מי סברת מדלין מדלין מיא מאי מדלין שלופי you think this m’dallin means you may draw water, it means: to pluck (ref. to Peah VII, 5).—Said Rabina to him: והתניא מדלין מים לירקות וכ׳ But it reads, M’dallin mayim you may sprinkle water &c.—Part. Pual מְדוּלָּל, f. מְדוּלֶּלֶת beggarly. Y. Succ. II, 52ᵈ bot.; v. דַּבְלוּל.
דְּלַל
- 1. to lift up (v. דְּלֵי). Keth. 72ᵃ דִּידַל יְדַלּוּנֵיה him who lifts up (his voice in funereal lamentations), they will lift up (praise him at his funeral); M. Kat. 28ᵇ
- 2. to thin, v. דְּלִיל.
- to lift one’s self up, be proud. Ib. [read:] דלא אִידַּל ידלוניה him who did not praise himself, they will &c. (Ms. M. 2 לא לִידַּל דדיילוניה, read: דִּייְדַלּוּנֵיה, let one not praise himself, in order that they may &c.).
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 H1809 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| דַלּ֣וֹנוּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural | Psalms 79:8 | 1 |
| דַלּ֪וֹתִ֫י | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Psalms 142:6 | 1 |
| דַּ֖לּוּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Job 28:4 | 1 |
| דַּ֝לּוֹתִ֗י | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Psalms 116:6 | 1 |
| דַּלְי֣וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Proverbs 26:7 | 1 |
| דַּלּ֤וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 38:14 | 1 |
| דָּלֲל֥וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 19:6 | 1 |
| וַ/יִּדַּ֧ל | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Judges 6:6 | 1 |
| יִדַּ֖ל | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 17:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1809, 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
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). 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.
