יָשִׁישׁ
old man
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (75%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3453 appears — 4 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.
Job 4 verses
- Job 12:12 בִּֽ/ישִׁישִׁ֥ים prep + Adjective Adjective mp With aged men is wisdom, In length of days understanding.
- Job 15:10 יָשִׁ֣ישׁ adj Adjective ms With us are both the gray-headed and the very aged men, Much elder than your father.
- Job 29:8 וִֽ֝/ישִׁישִׁים conj + Adjective Adjective mp The young men saw me and hid themselves, The aged rose up and stood;
- Job 32:6 יְשִׁישִׁ֑ים adj Adjective mp Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite answered, "I am young, and you are very old; Therefore I held back, and didn't dare show you my opinion.
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.
“old man” is the headline sense of the Hebrew adjective ישיש (yâshîysh). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Job. Its earliest occurrence is Job 12:12. Related forms include ישש and ישישי. See the sense tree, 4-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3453 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 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: Ancient 1×, Themselves and the aged 1×, Very aged 1×
- American Standard Version: Aged 1×, Themselves 1×, Very aged 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Aged 1×, Are old 1×, Is found with the elderly 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Aged 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3453 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3453 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3453 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3453 across 4 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 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.
- aged, old man, aged one
Word origin
adj. aged, only Jb (NH once יָשִׁישִׁים old, venerable men, Levy Jastr);—abs. יָשִׁישׁ Jb 15:10; pl. יְשִׁישִׁים 32:6 + 2 times;—aged, as pred. adj. Jb 32:6 (opp. צָעִיר לְיָמִים); as subst. 15:10 (‖ שָׂב); 29:8 (opp. נערים); בִּישִׁישִׁים חָכְמָה 12:12 among aged men is wisdom (‖ אֹרֶךְ יָמִים תְּבוּנָה).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ישש (yâshêsh) (H3486) — aged.
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.
יָשִׁישׁ
- [substantial,] old, venerable.—Pl. יְשִׁישִׁים. M. Kat. 25ᵇ, v. גֶּזַע.
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 4 distinct written forms H3453 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּֽ/ישִׁישִׁ֥ים | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 12:12 | 1 |
| וִֽ֝/ישִׁישִׁים | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 29:8 | 1 |
| יְשִׁישִׁ֑ים | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 32:6 | 1 |
| יָשִׁ֣ישׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 15:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3453, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
