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חַלְחָלָה

trembling

H2479 Strong's Hebrew
chalchâlâh Transliteration
/khal-khaw-law'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 4 appearances

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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.

The Hebrew noun חלחלה centers on the idea of “trembling.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. The word gravitates to Ezekiel (50%), then Isaiah and Nahum. Its earliest occurrence is Isaiah 21:3. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
pain
Modern gloss
trembling
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H2479 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 →

4
distinct verses
The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
3 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
Isaiah 21:3
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Isaiah 21:3.
Nahum 2:10
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Nahum 2:10.
#3,696
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 4 · 100%

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 4 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 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: Great pain 2×
  • American Standard Version: Anguish 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Anguish 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Anguish 3×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2479 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Great pain” 2×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H2479 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anguish” 3×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H2479 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anguish” 2×

Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H2479 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anguish” 3×

Plus 2 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.

  1. pain, trembling, terror, writhing, anguish

Word origin

n.f. anguish, מָֽלְאוּ מָתְנַי ח׳ Is 21:3, ח׳ בכל מתנים Na 2:11; Ez 30:4, 9 (‖ החריד).

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from חלחול (Chalchûwl) (H2478) — Halhul.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 623f


Forms in the corpus

The 4 distinct written forms H2479 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
וְ/חַלְחָלָה֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Nahum 2:10 1
חַלְחָלָ֔ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Isaiah 21:3 1
חַלְחָלָ֤ה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Ezekiel 30:9 1
חַלְחָלָה֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Ezekiel 30:4 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.