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אוּל

belly

‘belly’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓

H193 Strong's Hebrew
ʼûwl Transliteration
/ool/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 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.

אול (ʼûwl) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “belly.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. 2 Kings dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Kings 24:15. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
mighty
Modern gloss
belly
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H193 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
2 Kings 24:15
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in 2 Kings 24:15.
Psalms 73:4
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Psalms 73:4.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 50%
  • Wisdom 1 · 50%
  • 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 2 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%

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).

BDB lists this Strong’s number as 3 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.

  • King James Version: Strength 1×
  • American Standard Version: Strength 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Bodies 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Belly is 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H193 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Strength” 1×

Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H193 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Strength” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H193 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Bodies” 1×

Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H193 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Belly is” 1×

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 0 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.

אול I foolish

אול II [m.] body, belly

אול III [m.] leading man, noble

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

I. adj. foolish—א׳ Jb 5:2 +; pl. אֱוִילִים ψ 107:17 +, etc.;—foolish, Pr 29:9 (אִישׁ א׳) Ho 9:7 (pred. of prophet); cf. Is 35:8, elsewhere n.m. fool (always morally bad), who despises wisdom & discipline Pr 1:7; 15:5; mocks at guilt 14:9; is quarrelsome 20:3; licentious 7:22; it is folly & useless to instruct him 16:22; 27:22 (19 times Pr); cf. also Je 4:22; Jb 5:2, 3; Is 19:11 ψ 107:17.

I. n.[m.] body, belly; sf. אוּלָם (in contempt) ψ 73:4 (lit. their front, prominent part).

II. n.[m.] leading man, noble; pl. cstr. אוּלֵי הָאָרֶץ 2 K 24:15 Kt (Qr אֵילֵי v. iii. [איל]).

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

Origin: from an unused root meaning to twist, i.e. (by implication) be strong

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 45a


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.

אֲוַל

  • (אול to circle, v. חוּל, עול, cmp. עוֹלָם, תְּחִלָּה) beginning, early season. Targ. Hos. IX, 10; a. e.—מן א׳ from the beginning (of the world). Targ. Job. XX, 4; a. fr.—לאויל to (its) previous condition. Targ. Ez. XVI, 55 (some ed. לְאַוְלְהַן). Cmp. אלל.

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 H193 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
אוּלָֽ/ם Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct Psalms 73:4 1
אולי Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 2 Kings 24:15 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H193, 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.

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.