חֵֽלְכָה
poor person
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2489 appears — 3 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.
Psalms 3 verses
- Psalms 10:8 לְֽ/חֵלְכָ֥ה prep + n c fs He lies in wait near the villages. From ambushes, he murders the innocent. His eyes are secretly set against the helpless.
- Psalms 10:10 חלכאים n c fp The helpless are crushed, they collapse, They fall under his strength.
- Psalms 10:14 חֵלֶ֑כָה n c fs But you do see trouble and grief; You consider it to take it into your hand. You help the victim and the fatherless.
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.
חלכא — transliterated chêlᵉkâʼ — is a Hebrew adjective carrying the sense “poor person.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Psalms. Debuting at Psalms 10:8, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H2489 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 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: Against the poor 1×, Poor 1×
- American Standard Version: Against the helpless 1×, Down 1×, Helpless 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Helpless 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Helpless person 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2489 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2489 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2489 across 3 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 H2489 across 3 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.
- hapless, poor, unfortunate person
Word origin
חֵֽלְכָה adj. hapless, unfortunate, only as subst. hapless, luckless one ( s )
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: apparently from an unused root probably meaning to be dark or (fig.) unhappy
Forms in the corpus
The 3 distinct written forms H2489 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חֵלֶ֑כָה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 10:14 | 1 |
| חלכאים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 10:10 | 1 |
| לְֽ/חֵלְכָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 10:8 | 1 |
