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.
1 distinct verse where H3208 appears in the Absolute state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Ecclesiastes 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.
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.
