הָלַם
to strike
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”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H1986 appears in the Book of Psalms — 2 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.
Psalms
- Psalms 74:6 יַהֲלֹמֽוּ/ן Qal impf 3mp + sfx n Now all its carved work They break down with hatchet and hammers.
- Psalms 141:5 יֶֽהֶלְמֵֽ/נִי Qal impf 3ms + sfx pers 1cs Let the righteous strike me, it is kindness; Let him reprove me, it is like oil on the head; Don't let my head refuse it; Yet my prayer is always against evil deeds.
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.
הלם — transliterated hâlam — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to strike.” Its earliest occurrence is Judges 5:22. Spanning 9 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Isaiah (33% of all occurrences). Sharing its root, it stands alongside הלמות, יהלם and מהלמה. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1986 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 33%
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: Are overcome 1×, Beating down 1×, Broken 1×
- American Standard Version: Are overcome 1×, Hammer she smote 1×, Have broken down 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Have trampled 1×, Overcome 1×, She struck 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Beat 1×, Have stomped 1×, Here 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1986 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1986 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1986 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1986 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- (Qal) to smite, strike, hammer, strike down
Word origin
[ הָלַם ] vb. strike, hammer, strike down
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
הָלַם
- a. Arab. ḫilm friend; v. Fl. to Levy Talm. Dict. I, p. 558ᵃ)
- 1. to join, weld. Gen. R. s. 44 (ref. to הוֹלֶם פעם Is. XLI, 7) וה׳ את כל וכ׳ and welded all mankind to follow one road to the Lord; Yalk. ib. 76; Yalk. Is. 313. e.g. Isaiah 41:7
- 2. to be attached, fit closely. Ab. Zar. 44ᵃ מתנשא שביקש להוֹלְמוֹ ולא הוֹלַמְתּוֹ Ms. M. (ed. שמתנשא לה׳, corr. acc.) ‘he exalted himself’ (I Kings I, 5) means that he attempted to fasten (the crown to his head), but it would not fit him; Yalk. Kings 166; Snh. 21ᵇ.—[Tosef. Bekh. IV, 13 מוהלמות, read: מְבוּלָּמוֹת, v. בָּלַם.] e.g. 1 Kings 1:5
- to attach closely, paste on. Y. Ter. X, 47ᵃ bot. מַהֲלִימִין היו they made the pastry adhere to the mouth of the vessel.
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 H1986 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ה֣וֹלֶם | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 41:7 | 1 |
| הֲל֥וּמֵי | Verb, Qal, Participle Passive, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 28:1 | 1 |
| הֲלָמ֗וּ/נִי | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Proverbs 23:35 | 1 |
| הָלְמ֖וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Judges 5:22 | 1 |
| הָלְמ֣וּ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Isaiah 16:8 | 1 |
| וְ/הָלְמָ֤ה | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Judges 5:26 | 1 |
| וַ/הֲלֹֽם | Adverb | 1 Samuel 14:16 | 1 |
| יֶֽהֶלְמֵֽ/נִי | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 141:5 | 1 |
| יַהֲלֹמֽוּ/ן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Psalms 74:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1986, 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
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 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 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.
