חָלִיל
flute
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2485 appears in the Book of 1 Samuel — 1 distinct verse. 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.
1 Samuel
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.
“flute” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חליל (châlîyl). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. It concentrates in Isaiah, which alone accounts for 40% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is 1 Samuel 10:5. It clusters with חלל, חל and חלה under a shared root. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2485 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
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 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: Pipe 3×, Like pipes 2×
- American Standard Version: Pipe 3×, Like pipes 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Flutes 3×, Like a flute 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Flute 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2485 across 6 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2485 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2485 across 6 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2485 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.
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.
- pipe, flute
Word origin
n.m. flute, pipe, ח׳ 1 S 10:5 Is 5:12; 30:29; pl. חֲלִלִים 1 K 1:40 Je 48:36(×2).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חלל (châlal) (H2490) — to profane.
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.
חָלֵיל
- (v. חָלַל) to turn, bore, chisel. Targ. Is. X, 15.
חָלִיל
- , v. preced.) fife, flute; frequ. הֶחָלִיל the flute-players, the music in the procession. Arakh. II, 3 הח׳ מכה וכ׳ the fluters play in front of the altar. Ib. 10ᵇ היינו ח׳ היינו אבוב ḥalil and abbub are the same. Bicc. III, 3 הח׳ מכה לפניהם the fluters precede them playing. Succ. V, 1 הח׳ חמשה וכ׳ for musical performance (on the Succoth festival) there are five and six days respectively; a. fr.—Pl. חֲלִילִים, חֲלִילִין. Arakh. II, 3. B. Mets. VI, 1 להביא ח׳ וכ׳ to bring pipers for a wedding or a funeral. Kinnim III, 6; a. fr.
חֲלַל I
- 1. to perforate, v. חָלֵיל.
- 2. to degrade, profane. Part. pass. חָלִיל, f. חֲלִילָא. Targ. O. Lev. XXI, 14.
- 3. (denom. of חוּלָּא) to be profaned. Targ. Ez. XXII, 26 וְחַלַת.
- 1. to desecrate, profane, degrade. Targ. Prov. XXX, 9; a. e.—Part. pass. מְחַלַּל, f. מְחַלְלָא, מְחַלָּא. Targ. O. Lev. XXI, 7 (ed. Berl. מַחְלָא, Regia מְחָלָא).—Y. Kil. IX, 32ᵇ top, a. e. דילמא דחַלְּלִינָן וכ׳ did we perhaps desecrate the Sabbath?—Ber. 6ᵃ מְחַלְּלֵי Ms. (ed. מחליין); a. e.
- 2. to redeem. B. Mets. 44ᵇ טבעא אפירא לא מְחַלְּלִינָן we dare not redeem coins with goods.
- same, to desecrate. Targ. O. Lev. XIX, 8. Targ. Am. II, 7 לאָחָלָא (ed. Lag. לאפסא); a. fr.—Part. pass. f. מַחְלָא, v. supra.
- , אִתְּחַל to be profaned. Targ. Ez. XXXVI, 23 (not אַתְּחַל). Ib. VII, 24; a. fr.—Snh. 51ᵃ היכא דמִיתַּחֲלָא השתא if she degraded herself now; מית׳ וקיימא she was degraded before this.
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 6 distinct written forms H2485 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בֶּֽ/חָלִ֔יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 30:29 | 1 |
| בַּ/חֲלִלִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 1:40 | 1 |
| וְ/חָלִ֛יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 5:12 | 1 |
| וְ/חָלִ֣יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 10:5 | 1 |
| כַּ/חֲלִילִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 48:36 | 1 |
| כַּ/חֲלִלִ֣ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 48:36 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2485, 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
- חל chôl H2455 profane
- חלה challâh H2471 cake
- חלל châlâl H2491 slain
- מחלה mᵉchillâh H4247 hole
- תחלה tᵉchillâh H8462 beginning
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 9 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 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.
