חֵילָם
Helam
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Helam’ 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 H2431 appears — 2 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.
2 Samuel 2 verses
- 2 Samuel 10:16 חֵילָ֑ם n Proper Hadarezer sent, and brought out the Syrians who were beyond the River: and they came to Helam, with Shobach the captain of the host of Hadarezer at their head.
- 2 Samuel 10:17 חֵלָ֑אמָ/ה n Proper + sfx dem It was told David; and he gathered all Israel together, and passed over the Jordan, and came to Helam. The Syrians set themselves in array against David, and fought with 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.
חילם (Chêylâm) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Helam.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. 2 Samuel dominates its distribution — 2 of 2 verses. Debuting at 2 Samuel 10:16, it then recurs through the corpus. For the data behind this summary, explore 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2431 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Samuel 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Helam 2×
- American Standard Version†: Helam 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Helam 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Helam 1×, Toward helam 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2431 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2431 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2431 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2431 across 2† 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.
- Helam = "stronghold"
- a place east of the Jordan…
Word origin
I. v. sub I. II. חול supr.
I. n.pr.loc. E. of Jordan 2 S 10:16 (Th their army, but 𝔊 𝔖 I EwGesch. iii. 211 Anm. 1 = H iii. 155 n.2 We Dr) = חֵלָ֑א֯מָה v 17 (𝔊 Αιλαμ); + חילם Ez 47:16 (𝔊 Ηλιαμ) Co; according to this it lay on the border between Damascus and Hamath.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חיל (chayil) (H2428) — strength.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H2431 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חֵילָ֑ם | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 10:16 | 1 |
| חֵלָ֑אמָ/ה | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 10:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2431, 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
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 7 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Helam). 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
Place of abundance, a place on the east of Jordan and west of the Euphrates where David gained a great victory over the Syrian army (2 Sam. 10:16), which was under the command of Shobach. Some would identify it with Alamatta, near Nicephorium.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(stronghold), a place east of the Jordan but west of the Euphrates at which the Syrians were collected by Hadarezer, and where David met and defeated them. (2 Samuel 10:16,17)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
their army; their trouble
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
