חָלַשׁ
to weaken
‘to weaken’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2522 appears in the Book of Job — 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.
Job
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.
חלש — transliterated châlash — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to weaken.” A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than a third of its appearances fall in Exodus. It first appears in Exodus 17:13. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2522 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 33%
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: Didst weaken 1×, Discomfited 1×, Wasteth away 1×
- American Standard Version: Didst lay low 1×, Discomfited 1×, Is laid low 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Destroyer 1×, Is laid low 1×, Overwhelmed 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2522 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2522 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2522 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2522 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 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.
- to be weak, be prostrate
- to weaken, disable, prostrate
Word origin
[ חָלַשׁ ] vb. 1. be weak, prostrate. 2. weaken, disable, prostrate
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
חָלַשׁ
- (b. h.)
- 1. to relax, be weak, prostrated (cmp. חָלָה).—V. חַלָּשׁ.
- 2. [to round, smoothen, denom. חֵלֶשׁ smooth stone; (cmp. חֵלֶק) ballot; fr. which חָלַשׁ] to cast a lot; to assign. Pesik. Zakh., p. 22ᵃ expl. ויחלש, (Ex. XVIII, 13) הפיל עליהן גורלות he (Joshua) cast lots over them (for their destruction). Arakh. IX, 4 (31ᵇ) שיהא חוֹלֵשׁ … ללשכה (Mish. ed. בלשכה) that he might assign his redeeming money to the Temple fund (deposit it there, to assert his privilege of redemption). e.g. Exodus 18:13
חֲלַשׁ
- 1. to be weak, get sick. Targ. Is. II, 9. Targ. Lam. V, 17; a. e.—Pes. 50ᵃ; B. Bath. 10ᵇ, v. נְגַד.—R. Hash. 17ᵃ; a. fr.—Yoma 18ᵃ חַלְשָׁא דעתיה he might feel discouraged.
- 2. to pass away. R. Hash. l. c. חזייה דחליש ליה עלמא (Yalk. Mic. 559 … חזא דחלש) he saw that his world (life) was passing away (he was sinking rapidly).
- 3. to be smooth and fine. Ḥull. 48ᵃ סכינא דחָ׳ פומיה a knife whose edge is very fine.—
- *4. to untie, undress. Gen. R. s. 22 דין אמר חֲלוֹשׁ Ar. ed. Koh. (ed., a. Yalk. ib. 38 חֲלוֹץ) the one (Abel) said, Take thy clothes off. Gen. R. s. 75 ח׳ פורפירא Ar. (ed. שלח) he took off the purple cloak.
- 1. to weaken, reduce. Targ. Job XII, 21 Ms. (ed. מַחֲלִישׁ, מַחֲלֵשׁ Af.).
- 2. to smoothen, polish, forge (armour). Ab. Zar. 16ᵃ משׁום דחַלְּשֵׁי וכ׳ (Ms. M. דחשלי; v. infra) because they forge of them their polished armour.
- 1. to weaken, v. supra.
- 2. to cut with a sharp and smooth edge, opp. to בזע to tear with a notched knife. Ḥull. 17ᵇ (Rashi quoting Ab. Zar. l. c. דחשלי, a. Keth. 77ᵃ חשלי דודי appears to have read מחשיל).—
- *3. to strip. Targ. Y. II, Lev. I, 6 (O. a. Y. I שלח). Targ. Y. II, Num. XX, 26 ותחלישׁ (some ed. ותשליח).
חִלֶשׁ
- (v. חָלַשׁ, cmp. חֵלֶק) lot, ballot. Pesik. Zakh., p. 22ᵃ (ref. to ויחלש, Ex. XIII, 13) בח׳ לקה וכ׳ Amalek was smitten by ballot (v. חָלַשׁ). Ib. ארבעה שמות נקראו לגורל ח׳ וכ׳ the lot has four names, Ḥêlesh, pûr &c.; Yalk. Ex. 265.—Pl. חֲלָשִׁים, חֲלָשִׁין. Ib. (quotation) וכאשר יטילו ח׳ על המנות; Sabb. XXIII, 2 (148ᵇ) מטילין ח׳ וכ׳ lots may be cast for shares of sacred meat &c. Sabb. 149ᵇ מאי משמע דהאי ח׳ וכ׳ what evidence is there that ḥălashim means lot? (Answ. ref. to Is. XIV, 12). e.g. Exodus 13:13
חֵלַשׁ
- reed, v. חֵילַשׁ.
חַלָּשׁ
- weak. Sabb. 77ᵇ אימת ח׳ וכ׳ the fear with which the weak inspires the strong person.—Ex. R. s. 24; Sifré Deut. 309; a. e.—Pl. חַלָּשִׁים, חַלָּשִׁין. Ex. R. l. c.
חַלָּשׁ ²
- , v. חֲלִישׁ. Targ. O. Deut. XXVIII, 44. Targ. I Sam. IX, 21.—Pl. חַלָּשִׁין, חֲלָ׳. Targ. Ex. XXXII, 18.
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 3 distinct written forms H2522 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/יַּחֲלֹ֧שׁ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Exodus 17:13 | 1 |
| וַֽ/יֶּחֱלָ֑שׁ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 14:10 | 1 |
| חוֹלֵ֖שׁ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 14:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2522, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
