זִלְפָּה
Zilpah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Zilpah’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H2153 appears — 7 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Genesis 7 verses
- Genesis 29:24 זִלְפָּ֖ה n Proper Laban gave Zilpah his handmaid to his daughter Leah for a handmaid.
- Genesis 30:9 זִלְפָּ֣ה n Proper When Leah saw that she had finished bearing, she took Zilpah, her handmaid, and gave her to Jacob as a wife.
- Genesis 30:10 זִלְפָּ֛ה n Proper Zilpah, Leah's handmaid, bore Jacob a son.
- Genesis 30:12 זִלְפָּה֙ n Proper Zilpah, Leah's handmaid, bore Jacob a second son.
- Genesis 35:26 זִלְפָּ֛ה n Proper The sons of Zilpah (Leah's handmaid): Gad and Asher. These are the sons of Jacob, who were born to him in Paddan Aram.
- Genesis 37:2 זִלְפָּ֖ה n Proper This is the history of the generations of Jacob. Joseph, being seventeen years old, was feeding the flock with his brothers. He was a boy with the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father's wives. Joseph brought an evil report of them to their father.
- Genesis 46:18 זִלְפָּ֔ה n Proper These are the sons of Zilpah, whom Laban gave to Leah, his daughter, and these she bore to Jacob, even sixteen souls.
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.
זלפה — transliterated Zilpâh — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Zilpah.” More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Genesis. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. It first appears in Genesis 29:24. 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 H2153 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 7 verses 100%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 7 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: Zilpah 7×
- American Standard Version: Zilpah 7×
- Berean Standard Bible: Zilpah 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Zilpah 7×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2153 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2153 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2153 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2153 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Zilpah = "a trickling"
- the Syrian given by Laban to Leah as a handmaid, a concubine of Jacob, mother of Asher and Gad
Word origin
n.pr.f. Leah’s maid, one of Jacob’s wives, mother of Gad and Asher Gn 29:24; 30:9, 10, 12 (all J), 35:26; 37:2; 46:18 (all P).
— 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 apparently mean to trickle, as myrrh
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H2153 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| זִלְפָּ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 29:24 | 2 |
| זִלְפָּ֛ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:10 | 2 |
| זִלְפָּ֔ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 46:18 | 1 |
| זִלְפָּ֣ה | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:9 | 1 |
| זִלְפָּה֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 30:12 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Zilpah). 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
Drooping, Leah's handmaid, and the mother of Gad and Asher (Gen. 30:9-13).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(a trickling), a Syrian given by Laban to his daughter Leah as an attendant, (Genesis 29:24) and by Leah to Jacob as a concubine. She was the mother of Gad and Asher. (Genesis 30:9-13; 35:26; 37:2; 46:18) (B.C. 1753.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
distillation from the mouth
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
