חָסִיל
locust
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2625 appears in the Book of Joel — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Joel
- Joel 1:4 הֶ/חָסִֽיל ptcl def.art + n c ms What the swarming locust has left, the great locust has eaten. What the great locust has left, the grasshopper has eaten. What the grasshopper has left, the caterpillar has eaten.
- Joel 2:25 וְ/הֶ/חָסִ֣יל conj + ptcl def.art + n c ms I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, The great locust, the grasshopper, and the caterpillar, My great army, which I sent among you.
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.
“locust” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חסיל (châçîyl). Its earliest occurrence is 1 Kings 8:37. It turns up in 6 verses across 5 books, an uncommon footprint. It concentrates in Joel, which alone accounts for 33% of its uses. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2625 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 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 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Joel 2 verses 33%
- 1 Kings 1 verse 17%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 67%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 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: Caterpiller 3×
- American Standard Version: Caterpillar 3×, Or caterpillar 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Destroying locust 2×, Grasshoppers 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Destroying locust 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2625 across 6 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2625 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 H2625 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 H2625 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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.
- locust
Word origin
n.m. a kind of locust (sg. coll.), always abs. ח׳, and always as destructive; 1 K 8:37 = 2 Ch 6:28 ψ 78:46 (all ‖ אַרְבֶּה), Jo 1:4; 2:25 (‖ יָ֑לֶק, אַרְבֶּה, גָּוָם); cf. אֹסֶף הֶחָ׳ Is 33:4 the gathering of the locust, in sim. of despoiling of Assyria (‖ גֵּבִים).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חסל (châçal) (H2628) — to consume.
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.
חֲסִיל
- , v. חֲסַל
חָסִיל
- [the peeler,] name of a species of locusts. Snh. 94ᵇ. Y. Taan. III, 66ᵈ, v. חָסַל.
חֲסַל
- , [to scrape off; (cmp. חָנַךְ) to finish,]
- 1. to cease, have done (cmp. גָּמַר). Targ. II Chr. IV, 11.—חֲסִיל to be exhausted, gone. Targ. Y. II, Gen. XLVII, 15. Targ. Y. II, Deut. XXXI, 24; a. e.—Targ. Y. II, Gen. L, 19 חַסְלַת וכ׳ the evil is paid off (atoned for; cmp. גמל).—Y. R. Hash. II, 58ᵇ top מן דַחֲסַל … מן וכ׳ when R. … had ceased from praying. Gen. R. s. 17, beg. מן דחַסְלִין (not דמן ח׳) when they had finished their studies; a. fr.
- 2. to mature, ripen. Targ. Y. II, Num. XVII, 23 (h. text גמל).
- 3. to wean. Targ. I Sam. I, 24 (h. text גמל); a. fr.
- 1. to peel off, lay bare. Targ. O. Deut. XXVIII, 38.
- 2. to finish. Targ. Y. II, Gen. XLVI, 18.—Y. Bicc. I, 64ᵃ מְחַסֵּל לה finished the sentence (by adding a general rule). Cant. R. beg. זימנין מח׳ לה וכ׳ sometimes he goes through the entire alphabet &c.; (Koh. R. to I, 13 חשל); a. fr.
- to be weaned. Targ. O. Gen. XXI, 8 (ed. Berl. אִתְחַ׳); a. e.
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 H2625 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הֶ/חָסִֽיל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joel 1:4 | 1 |
| הֶֽ/חָסִ֑יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 33:4 | 1 |
| וְ/הֶ/חָסִ֣יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joel 2:25 | 1 |
| וְ/חָסִיל֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 6:28 | 1 |
| חָסִיל֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 8:37 | 1 |
| לֶ/חָסִ֣יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 78:46 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
