חֹבֵל
sailor
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where H2259 appears in the Construct state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Ezekiel 4 verses
- Ezekiel 27:8 חֹבְלָֽיִ/ךְ n c mp cs + sfx pers 2fs The inhabitants of Sidon and Arvad were your rowers: your wise men, Tyre, were in you, they were your pilots.
- Ezekiel 27:27 וְ/חֹבְלָ֑יִ/ךְ conj + n c mp cs + sfx pers 2fs Your riches, and your wares, your merchandise, your mariners, and your pilots, your repairers of ship seams, and the dealers in your merchandise, and all your men of war, who are in you, with all your company which is in the midst of you, shall fall into the heart of the seas in the day of your ruin.
- Ezekiel 27:28 חֹבְלָ֑יִ/ךְ n c mp cs + sfx pers 2fs At the sound of the cry of your pilots the suburbs shall shake.
- Ezekiel 27:29 חֹבְלֵ֣י n c mp cs All who handled the oar, the mariners, [and] all the pilots of the sea, shall come down from their ships; they shall stand on the land,
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, חבל (chôbêl) means “sailor.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Ezekiel (80% of all occurrences). It first appears in Ezekiel 27:8. Sharing its root, it stands alongside חבל, חבל and חבל. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2259 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 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: Pilots 2×
- American Standard Version: Pilots 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Captains 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pilots 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2259 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2259 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H2259 across 4 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 H2259 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- sailor, seaman
Word origin
חֹבֵל n.m. sailor (i.e. rope -puller)
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חבל (châbal) (H2254) — to bind.
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.
חָבַל
- 1. to seize, to take a pledge. Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 1, a. e., v. חֲבוֹלָה.—B. Mets. IX, 13 (115ᵃ) החוֹבֵל את הריחים he who seizes millstones (for his debt); a. fr.
- 2. to twist (v. חֶבֶל); to do violence, unshape; to inflict a wound, to hurt (followed by ב of the object). B. Kam. VIII, 1 החוֹבֵל בחבירו he who injures his neighbor. Sabb. XIV, 1. Ib. 106ᵃ חובל בצריך לכלבו one who wounds (an animal on the Sabbath is guilty) when he needs the blood for his dog. Ib. חובל בעלמא one who wounds generally (not for a purpose); a. fr.
- 3. to writhe, travail, v. Pi.
- 1. to be seized. Yalk. Ex. 351 שניתן לֵיחָבֵל ביום (B. Mets. 114ᵇ לַחֲבוֹל) which may be seized as a pledge in day time.
- 2. to be injured. Tosef. B. Kam. IX, 29 אע"פ שלא … מן הנֶחְבָּל וכ׳ although the injurer does not ask the injured (to pray for him), the injured must pray &c.; a. fr.
- 1. to injure, wound; to unshape, ruin, spoil. Ber. 51ᵃ יש לי … לחַבֵּל I have permission to injure (kill). B. Kam. 91ᵇ לחַבֵּל בעצמו to mutilate one’s self.—Kel. XIV, 2 משיְחַבֵּל from the moment he batters (the tube, for fitting it into the top of the staff); Tosef. Kel. B. Mets. IV, 5 משיִחְבּוֹל, v. חָבַר. Num. R. s. 10 (play on חִבֵּל, Prov. XXIII, 34) שחִבְּלָתוֹ יעל וכ׳ whom Jael mutilated on his head. Yalk. Ex. 301 חִבַּלְתֶּם מעשיכם you have ruined (turned to evil) your deeds. Snh. 24ᵃ מְחַבְּלִין זה לזה וכ׳ (Ms. K. זה את זה) wound each other’s feelings in discussions; a. fr. e.g. Proverbs 23:34
- 2. to travail. Taan. 8ᵃ bot. מְחַבֶּלֶת ואינה יולדת (Rashi: חוֹבֶלֶת) travails but cannot give birth.—Pass. pass. מְחוּבָּל ruined. Ex. R. s. 30.
- to be spoiled, ruined. Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 1 נותן דבר המְחַבֵּל לתוך דבר המִתְחַבֵּל he puts a thing which spoils (the taste) into a thing which is spoiled.
חֲבַל I
- , fut. יַחְבּוֹל same, to wrong, be violent. Targ. Job XXXIV, 31.
- 1. to injure; to ruin, destroy &c. (corresp. to b. h. הִשְׁחִית). Targ. O. Lev. XIX, 27. Targ. Gen. VI, 12; a. fr.—Part. pass. מְחַבַּל mutilated, blemished. Targ. O. Deut. XXIII, 2. Targ. Mal. I, 14.—B. Kam. 87ᵃ אי בעי מְחַבֵּל בה לא מצי חַבֵּיל Ms. M. (ed. מתח׳, incorr.) if he desired to wound her (his daughter), he dared not.
- 2. to travail. Denom. מְחַבַּלְתָּא.
- to be corrupted, destroyed. Targ. Gen. VI, 11, sq. Targ. Job XVII, 1; a. e. [Targ. Ps. LXII, 11, v. הֲבַל.]—Ithpe. אִיחֲבַל to get sick. B. Mets. 97ᵃ ואי׳ ומית Ms. H. (ed. חֲבִיל).
חֲבַל II
- (preced.)
- 1. injury, v. חַבְלָא I. I.
- 2. woe!, Oh! (cmp. בִּיָּיא II). Targ. Job X, 15 (Var. חֲבֵיל, חֲבוֹל); a. e.—[Also in Hebr. diction] Ned. 74ᵇ ח׳ עליך וכ׳ woe unto thee! (a pity) that &c. Snh. 111ᵃ; Ex. R. s. 6, a. e. ח׳ על דאבדין וכ׳ Oh, for those who are gone and cannot be replaced! Ex. R. s. 26; Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 6 (prov.) נפל ביתא ח׳ לכוותא (not אבל) when the house falls, woe to the windows!; a. fr.
- 3. (adv.) to ruin. Pes. 20ᵇ תשפך ח׳ (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 9) it must be poured out (and go) to ruin; B. Kam. 116ᵃ (ed. הכל, corr. acc., v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 30), opp. to תעשה זילוף, v. זִילּוּף.
חֲבֵל
- , v. חֲבֵיל
חֶבֶל
- 1. rope, a measure of dimensions, rope’s length. Gen. R. s. 93 קשר ח׳ בח׳ tied rope to rope, v. נִימָא; Cant. R. to I, 1. Erub. V, 4 וכ׳ אין מודדין אלא בח׳ Sabbath distances must be measured with a rope of fifty cubits’ length. Ib. 58ᵃ, v. אַפְסְקִימָא. B. Bath. VII, 2 (103ᵇ) מדה בח׳ measured with the rope (exact dimensions). Peah IV, 5 על הח׳ in a straight line, v. לָקַט; a. fr.—Pl. חֲבָלִים. Erub. l. c. ג׳ ח׳ הם וכ׳ there are three kinds of ropes (used for legal purposes).—Trnsf. share, possession. Sifré Deut. 312 אין ח׳ אלא גורל ḥebel means lot; a. e.
חֵבֶל
- 1. writhing, throes of birth, agony. Snh. 98ᵇ, a. e. חֶבְלוֹ של משיח the sufferings which are to precede the advent of the Messiah.—Pl. חֲבָלִים, constr. חֶבְלֵי. Nidd. 31ᵃ ח׳ נקבה the pains at giving birth to a female. Ib. חבלי של נקבה (read: חבלים). Ib. וזהו ח׳ אשה and this is the cause of woman’s throes.
- 2. damage, injury. Mekh. Mishp., N’zikin, s. 8 ח׳ אשה לבעל the damages for a wife’s injury belong to her husband.
חִיבּוּל
- 1. wound, injury. Targ. Lev. XIX, 28; XXI, 5.—M. Kat. 28ᵇ, v. חֲבִילָא I.
- 2. moral defect, corruption. Targ. Job XI, 15. Ib. XXXI, 7; a. e.
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 5 distinct written forms H2259 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/חֹבֵ֔ל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:6 | 1 |
| וְ/חֹבְלָ֑יִ/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:27 | 1 |
| חֹבְלֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:29 | 1 |
| חֹבְלָ֑יִ/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:28 | 1 |
| חֹבְלָֽיִ/ךְ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 27:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2259, 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
- חבל chăbal H2255 to destroy
- חבל chebel H2256 cord
- חבל chăbôl H2258 pledge
- חבל chibbêl H2260 mast
- תחבלה tachbulâh H8458 counsel
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
