חֵ֫לֶם
Helem
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Helem’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H2494 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.
Zechariah 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.
חלם — transliterated Chêlem — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Helem.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in Zechariah (100% of all occurrences). Found nowhere else but Zechariah 6:14. See 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2494 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
- Zechariah 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: Shall be to helem 1×
- American Standard Version: Shall be to helem 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Helem 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Helem 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2494 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2494 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2494 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2494 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.
- Helem = "strength" or " dream"
- a returned exile in the time of Zechariah; also spelled 'Heldai'
Word origin
n.pr.m. (strength)—a returned exile Zc 6:14 = חֶלְדַּי v 10.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חלם (châlam) (H2492) — to dream.
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.
חָלַם I
- [to be soft, moist, viscous,] to have good humors, to be well. Part. pass. חָלוּם, f. חֲלוּמָה sane, opp. to שוטה; well, opp. to חולה. Tosef. Ter. I, 3 פעמים … ח׳ if one is at times insane, at times sane; R. Hash. 28ᵃ חַלִּים (Ch. form).—Y. Gitt. VII, beg. 48ᶜ.—Pes. 78ᵇ.—Fem. חֲלוּמָה. Y. Yeb. XIV, beg. 14ᵇ
חֲלַם
- v. חַלִּים
- to join closely. Kidd. 25ᵃ זמנין דח׳ שפוותיה Ar. (ed. שפתיה) sometimes a man closes his lips firmly.
חָלַם II
- v. preced. wds.) [to gather humors, to sleep well (cmp. יָשַׁן).—Denom. חֲלוֹם (cmp. ἐνύπνιος, somnium) dream; from which חָלַם] to dream. Ber. 55ᵇ חלום חָלַמְתִּי I had a dream. Ib. חלום שׁח׳ לו חבירו a dream which his neighbor had about him. Tosef. Sabb. VI (VII), 7 שתהא חוֹלֵם חלומות that you may have dreams; a. fr.
חֲלַם ²
- Targ. Gen. XXXVII, 5. Ib. XLI, 1; a. fr.
- to consult an interpreter of dreams or a dreamer. Targ. Jer. XXIX, 8, v. חָלְמָא.
חֲלֹם
- , v. חֲלוֹם
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 H2494, 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
- אחלמה ʼachlâmâh H306 amethyst
- חלום chălôwm H2472 dream
- חלם chêlem H2493 dream
- חלמות challâmûwth H2495 purslane
- חלמיש challâmîysh H2496 flint
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 8 — 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.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Helem). 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
A stroke, great-grandson of Asher (1 Chr. 7:35).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(strength).
+ A descendant of Asher. (1 Chronicles 7:35) + A man mentioned only in (Zechariah 6:14) Apparently the same as Heldai.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
dreaming; healing
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.
