חַלְחוּל
Halhul
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Halhul’ 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 H2478 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.
Joshua 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.
At its core, חלחול (Chalchûwl) means “Halhul.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Joshua (100% of all occurrences). It occurs only once, in Joshua 15:58. 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 H2478 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
- Joshua 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: Halhul 1×
- American Standard Version: Halhul 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Halhul 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Halhul 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2478 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2478 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2478 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2478 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- Halhul = "trembling"
- a town on a hill in the mountains of Judah to the left of the road from Jerusalem to Hebron and about 3-4 (5-7…
Word origin
n.pr.loc. town in Judah, Jos 15:58 LagOnom. 119. 7, 2nd ed. 152 Elul in tribu Iuda, cf. Alula juxta Chebron; mod. Ḥalḥûl, 1 1/2 hour (3 1/2 miles) N. from Hebron, v. Di (and reff.) Bla RobBR iii. 281 f. Guérin Judée iii. 284 ff.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חול (chûwl) (H2342) — to writhe.
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.
חִלְחוּל
- (חִלְחֵל) penetration of a poisonous substance, poison. Tanḥ. Mishp. 18; ed. Bub. 12 (חול׳, corr. acc.) הח׳ היה נכנס וכ׳ the poison (of the flies) entered their bodies; Yalk. Ex. 359.
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 H2478, 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
- חול chôwl H2344 sand
- חיל chîyl H2427 anguish
- חיל chayil H2428 strength
- חלה châlâh H2470 to be sick
- מחול mâchôwl H4234 dance
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 10 — 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 (Halhul). 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
Full of hollows, a town in the highlands of Judah (Josh. 15:58). It is now a small village of the same name, and is situated about 5 miles north-east of Hebron on the way to Jerusalem. There is an old Jewish tradition that Gad, David's seer (2 Sam. 24:11), was buried here.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(trembling), a town of Judah in the mountain district. (Joshua 16:68) The name still remains unaltered attached to a conspicuous hill a mile to the left of the road from Jerusalem to Hebron, between three and four miles from the latter.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
grief; looking for grief
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
