חַיּוּת
living
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2424 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
2 Samuel 1 verse
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.
חיות (chayûwth) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “living.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. It clusters heavily in 2 Samuel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. A true hapax — its single appearance is 2 Samuel 20:3. From the same root come חיה, חי and חיא. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2424 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Samuel 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Living 1×
- American Standard Version: Living 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Living 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Life 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2424 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2424 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2424 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2424 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- living
Word origin
n.f. abstr. אַלְמְנוּת חַיּוּת 2 S 20:3, lit. ‘widowhood of livingness,’ Dr; We reads אַלְמָנוֹת חַיּוֹת living widows (‘grass-widows,’ who were separated from their husbands), after 𝔊 χῆραι ζῶσαι, so SS.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חיה (châyâh) (H2421) — to live.
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.
חַיָּה I
- 1. (adj.) v. חַי.
- 2. animal, esp. beast of chase, deer &c., contrad. to בְּהֵמָה. Ḥull. VI, 1 ונוהג בח׳ ובעוף and applies to beasts of chase and birds; a. fr.—Ab. V, 9, a. fr. ח׳ רעה the plague of wild beasts. Ex. R. s. 35 (ref. to Ps. LXVIII, 31) ח׳ הדרה וכ׳ the beast that lives between the reeds (Rome).—Sabb. 151ᵇ; Snh. 38ᵇ, a. e. אין ח׳ רעה שולטת וכ׳ no wild beast has power over man, unless he appears to it to resemble a brute creature; a. fr.—Pl. חַיּוֹת. Taan. 8ᵃ לע"ל … כל הח׳ וכ׳ in the future all the wild beasts shall gather and come to the serpent &c. Bets. 25ᵇ כלב בח׳ the dog (is the most irrepressible) among the wild beasts. Ber. 61ᵇ פקח שבח׳ the shrewdest of all animals; a. v. fr.—Esp. Ḥayoth, legendary celestial creatures (Ez. I, 5). Ḥag. 13ᵃ; a. fr. e.g. Psalms 68:31
חַיּוּת
- living, support. Ber. 61ᵇ במקים חַיּוּתֵנוּ (חַיּוּתֵינוּ) in the element in which we live (the water). Gen. R. s. 20 (play on חַוָּה) ניתנה לו לחַיּוּתוֹ וכ׳ she had been given to him for his strength, but she advised him like a serpent; a. e.—Pl. חַיּוֹת, v. next w.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2424, 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
- חי chay H2416 living
- חיא chăyâʼ H2418 to live
- חיה châyeh H2422 lively
- חיי châyay H2425 to live
- מחיה michyâh H4241 sustenance
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 9 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
