יֶ֫לֶק
locust
‘locust’ 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
- 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 H3218 appears — 7 distinct verses across 4 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
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 51:14 כַּ/יֶּ֔לֶק prep det + n c ms Yahweh of Hosts has sworn by himself, [saying], Surely I will fill you with men, as with the canker-worm; and they shall lift up a shout against you.
- Jeremiah 51:27 כְּ/יֶ֥לֶק prep + n c ms Set up a standard in the land, blow the trumpet among the nations, prepare the nations against her, call together against her the kingdoms of Ararat, Minni, and Ashkenaz: appoint a marshal against her; cause the horses to come up as the rough canker-worm.
Joel 2 verses
- Joel 1:4 הַ/יָּ֑לֶק הַ/יֶּ֔לֶק ptcl def.art + n c ms 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 הַ/יֶּ֖לֶק 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.
Nahum 2 verses
- Nahum 3:15 כַּ/יָּ֑לֶק כַּ/יֶּ֔לֶק prep det + n c ms prep det + n c ms There the fire will devour you. The sword will cut you off. It will devour you like the grasshopper. Multiply like grasshoppers. Multiply like the locust.
- Nahum 3:16 יֶ֥לֶק n c ms You have increased your merchants more than the stars of the skies. The grasshopper strips, and flees away.
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.
ילק (yeleq) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “locust.” It first appears in Psalms 105:34. With 7 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Jeremiah, which alone accounts for 29% of its uses. Not a single-sense word: explore its full sense range. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3218 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 86%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 14%
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: Cankerworm 4×, Caterpillers 3×
- American Standard Version: Canker-worm 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Young locust 4×, Locusts 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hopping locust 3×, Creeping locust 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3218 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3218 across 9 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3218 across 9 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3218 across 7 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.
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 3 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- a. as devouring ‖ גָּזָם, אַרְבֶּה, חָסִיל, Jo 1:4(×2) 2:25; ‖ אַרְבֶּה ψ 105:34 (of Egyptian plague), cf. Na 3:15a (but del. We). e.g. Joel 1:4
- b. in sim. of multitude of men Na 3:15b Je 51:14; of horses v 27 (יֶלֶק סָמָר). e.g. Nahum 3:15
- c. in sim. of scattering and disappearing Na 3:16. e.g. Nahum 3:16
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.m. Na 3:16 a kind of locust, abs. יֶלֶק Na 3:16 + 5 times; יָ֑לֶק Jo 1:4 + 2 times;—always coll.:
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to lick up
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.
יֶלֶק
- yelek, a species of locusts (LXX: βροῦχος). Pesik. Zakh., p. 26ᵇ (play on ע̇מ̇ל̇ק̇) ע̇ם̇ יל̇ק̇ פרח כהדין זחלא Ar. (ed. לק) a people of locusts, quick as the zaḥal (v. זַחֲלָא); Yalk. Deut. 938; Tanḥ. Ki Tsetsé 9; ed. Bub. 12 לק (v. לָק).
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 8 distinct written forms H3218 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כַּ/יֶּ֔לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 51:14 | 2 |
| הַ/יֶּ֔לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joel 1:4 | 1 |
| הַ/יֶּ֖לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joel 2:25 | 1 |
| הַ/יָּ֑לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Joel 1:4 | 1 |
| וְ֝/יֶ֗לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 105:34 | 1 |
| יֶ֥לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nahum 3:16 | 1 |
| כְּ/יֶ֥לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 51:27 | 1 |
| כַּ/יָּ֑לֶק | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nahum 3:15 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
