חַשְׁמַל
amber
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 H2830 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.
Ezekiel 3 verses
- Ezekiel 1:4 הַ/חַשְׁמַ֖ל ptcl def.art + n c ms I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with flashing lightning, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst of it as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire.
- Ezekiel 1:27 חַשְׁמַ֗ל n c ms I saw as it were glowing metal, as the appearance of fire within it round about, from the appearance of his loins and upward; and from the appearance of his loins and downward I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and there was brightness round about him.
- Ezekiel 8:2 הַ/חַשְׁמַֽלָ/ה ptcl def.art + n c ms + sfx h Then I saw, and, behold, a likeness as the appearance of fire; from the appearance of his loins and downward, fire; and from his loins and upward, as the appearance of brightness, as it were glowing metal.
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.
“amber” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חשמל (chashmal). It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Ezekiel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. First canonically at Ezekiel 1:4, it enters the text early. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2830 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
- Ezekiel 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Amber 3×
- American Standard Version: Metal 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Like amber 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Glowing metal 1×, Metal 1×, Was the color of amber 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2830 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2830 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2830 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 H2830 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- a shining substance, amber or electrum or bronze (uncertain)
Word origin
n.[m.] etym. and exact meaning dub.; evidently some shining substance; AV amber; supposed by Thes (q.v.) and most to be a brilliant amalgam of gold and silver, 𝔊 ἤλεκτρον (v Liddell & Scott s. v. 2), 𝔙 electrum; v. also Dl in BaerEzech. xii; only in the combination כְּעֵין ח׳ like the appearance of ח׳ Ez 1:4, 27; כְּעֵין הַחַשְׁמַ֑לָה Ez 8:2 (on ending ה—ָ v. Ges§ 90 f; Co del.).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of uncertain derivation
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.
חַשְׁמַל
- cmp. חָסַם II; v. Ges. H. Dict.10 s. v.) a glittering substance; amber or galena (?). Ḥag. 13ᵃ עד הח׳ including the verse in which ḥashmal appears (Ez. I, 27). Ib. היה מבין בח׳ was speculating on the meaning of ḥashmal; ויצאה אש מח׳ and fire came out of the ḥashmal. Ib., sq. מהו ח̇ש̇מ̇ל̇ ח̇יות אש̇ מְמַ֗לְּ֗לוֹת Ḥayoth (v. חַיָּה) speaking fire; v. חָשָׁה. e.g. Ezekiel 1:27
חַשְׁמָל
- Targ. Ez. I, 4; a. e.—Ḥag. 13ᵃ
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 H2830 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/חַשְׁמַ֖ל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 1:4 | 1 |
| הַ/חַשְׁמַֽלָ/ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 8:2 | 1 |
| חַשְׁמַ֗ל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 1:27 | 1 |
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.
