הֵיכַל
temple
‘temple’ is one of 4 main senses 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
- 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).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Particle, Definite Article 10 times (77%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 3 times (23%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 13 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1965 appears — 10 distinct verses across 2 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.
Ezra 4 verses
- Ezra 4:14 הֵֽיכְלָ/א֙ n c ms det + ptcl def.art Now because we eat the salt of the palace, and it is not appropriate for us to see the king's dishonor, therefore have we sent and informed the king;
- Ezra 5:14 הֵֽיכְלָ/א֙ לְ/הֵיכְלָ֖/א הֵֽיכְלָ/א֙ n c ms det + ptcl def.art prep + n c ms det + ptcl def.art n c ms det + ptcl def.art The gold and silver vessels also of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took out of the temple that was in Jerusalem, and brought into the temple of Babylon, those did Cyrus the king take out of the temple of Babylon, and they were delivered to one whose name was Sheshbazzar, whom he had made governor;
- Ezra 5:15 בְּ/הֵיכְלָ֖/א prep + n c ms det + ptcl def.art and he said to him, Take these vessels, go, put them in the temple that is in Jerusalem, and let the house of God be built in its place.
- Ezra 6:5 הֵיכְלָ֥/א לְ/הֵיכְלָ֤/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art prep + n c ms det + ptcl def.art Also let the gold and silver vessels of the house of God, which Nebuchadnezzar took forth out of the temple which is at Jerusalem, and brought to Babylon, be restored, and brought again to the temple which is at Jerusalem, everyone to its place; and you shall put them in the house of God.
Daniel 6 verses
- Daniel 4:4 בְּ/הֵיכְלִֽ/י prep + n c ms cs + sfx pers 1cs I, Nebuchadnezzar, was at rest in my house, and flourishing in my palace.
- Daniel 4:29 הֵיכַ֧ל n c ms cs At the end of twelve months he was walking in the royal palace of Babylon.
- Daniel 5:2 הֵיכְלָ֖/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink from it.
- Daniel 5:3 הֵֽיכְלָ֛/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, drank from them.
- Daniel 5:5 הֵיכְלָ֖/א n c ms det + ptcl def.art In the same hour came forth the fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.
- Daniel 6:18 לְ/הֵֽיכְלֵ/הּ֙ prep + n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms Then the king went to his palace, and passed the night fasting; neither were instruments of music brought before him: and his sleep fled from him.
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.
The Hebrew noun היכל centers on the idea of “temple.” Daniel dominates its distribution — 6 of 10 verses. Spanning 10 verses in 2 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its earliest occurrence is Ezra 4:14. Lexicons map it across 4 senses. Dig into 10-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1965 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 10 occurrences in the concordance →
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 10 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 10 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: Temple 8×, Palace 4×
- American Standard Version: Temple 8×, Palace 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Temple 7×, Palace 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Temple 8×, Palace 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1965 across 13 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 H1965 across 13 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 H1965 across 12 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1965 across 14 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.
Senses in BDB
The 4 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.
- palace, temple
- palace
- temple (in Jerusalem)
- temple (pagan)
Word origin
[ הֵיכַל ] n.m. palace, temple
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from היכל (hêykâl) (H1964) — temple.
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.
הֵיכָל
- (b. h.) palace, the Temple; esp. the Holy, the hall containing the golden altar &c., contrad. to the Holy of Holies, v. דְּבִיר. Midd. IV, 1; a. fr.—Ned. I, 3 כה׳ as forbidden as the offerings of the Temple (a vow formula). Y. Succ. V, 55ᶜ ומשחיתים לה׳ (not ומשתחוים, v. Rashi to Ez. VIII, 16) and offended the Temple (through indecency); a. fr.—Pl. הֵיכָלוֹת. Y. Shek. V, end, 49ᵇ (quot. fr. Hos. VIII, 14). e.g. Ezekiel 8:16
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 10 distinct written forms H1965 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הֵֽיכְלָ/א֙ | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 4:14 | 3 |
| הֵיכְלָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 5:2 | 2 |
| בְּ/הֵיכְלִֽ/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 4:4 | 1 |
| בְּ/הֵיכְלָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 5:15 | 1 |
| הֵֽיכְלָ֛/א | Particle, Definite Article | Daniel 5:3 | 1 |
| הֵיכְלָ֥/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 6:5 | 1 |
| הֵיכַ֧ל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 4:29 | 1 |
| לְ/הֵֽיכְלֵ/הּ֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 6:18 | 1 |
| לְ/הֵיכְלָ֖/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 5:14 | 1 |
| לְ/הֵיכְלָ֤/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 6:5 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 10 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 10 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.
