יַלְדוּת
childhood
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- 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, Plural, Construct 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, 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 H3208 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 books. 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 1 verse
Ecclesiastes 2 verses
- Ecclesiastes 11:9 בְּ/יַלְדוּתֶ֗י/ךָ prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 2ms Rejoice, young man, in your youth, And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth, And walk in the ways of your heart, And in the sight of your eyes; But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.
- Ecclesiastes 11:10 הַ/יַּלְד֥וּת ptcl def.art + n c fs Therefore remove sorrow from your heart, And put away evil from your flesh; For youth and the dawn of life are vanity.
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.
The Hebrew noun ילדות centers on the idea of “childhood.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Ecclesiastes (67%), then Psalms. Debuting at Psalms 110:3, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with ילד, ולד and ילדה. Dig into 3-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3208 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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
- Ecclesiastes 2 verses 67%
- Psalms 1 verse 33%
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: Youth 2×
- American Standard Version: Youth 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Youth 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Youth 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3208 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3208 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3208 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 H3208 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.
- childhood, youth
Word origin
יַלְדוּת n.f. childhood, youth
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ילד (yeled) (H3206) — child.
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.
יֶלֶד
- preced.) child, young man. Nidd. 60ᵇ י׳ וזקן וכ׳ a young man and an old man travelling. Ex. R. s. 1; Sot. 12ᵇ הוא י׳ וקולו כנער he (Moses) was an infant, but his voice was that of a lad.—Y. Meg. III, 74ᵃ bot., v. אֶבְדּוֹקוֹס; a. fr.—Pl. יְלָדִים. Ex. R. l. c. קיימו את (החיו) הו׳ they spared the lives of the new-born. Kidd. 76ᵇ, a. e. ד׳ מאות י׳ וכ׳ David had four hundred young men in his suite; a. fr.—Fem. יַלְדָּה girl, young woman. B. Kam. 60ᵇ אחת י׳ ואחת זקינה one wife was young, the other old. Yeb. 101ᵇ; a. fr.—Pl. יְלָדוֹת. Sabb. 32ᵃ ר"א … מתות י׳ R. El. reports, ‘for three sins women die young’ (in place of יוֹלְדוֹת, v. יוֹלֶדֶת); Y. ib. II, 5ᵇ top.—Trnsf. יַלְּדָּה a young plant. Men. 69ᵇ; Sot. 43ᵇ, a. e. י׳ שסבכה בזקנה a young shoot (subject to the law of Orlah, v. עָרְלָה) which was grafted on an old tree. Ib. י׳ בי׳ a young shoot grafted on a young tree.
יַלְדּוּת
- preced. wds.) childhood, youth; waywardness. Ḥull. 24ᵇ ביַלְדּוּתִי in my childhood. Ab. Zar. 52ᵇ שנית לנו ביַלְדּוּתְךָ וכ׳ in thy earlier days thou didst teach us &c.; B. Mets. 44ᵃ (not בילדותיך). Succ. 53ᵃ, v. בּוֹשׁ.—B. Bath. 131ᵃ י׳ היתה בי וכ׳ I was wayward and set my face against &c.; 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 3 distinct written forms H3208 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/יַלְדוּתֶ֗י/ךָ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Ecclesiastes 11:9 | 1 |
| הַ/יַּלְד֥וּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 11:10 | 1 |
| יַלְדֻתֶֽי/ךָ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 110:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3208, 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
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.
