יִשְׁמְעֵאלִי
Ishmaelite
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Ishmaelite’ 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
- Gentilic
- A noun naming a member of a people, tribe, or region of origin (e.g. an Israelite, a Moabite).
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.
Every verse where H3459 appears in the Book of Genesis — 4 distinct verses. 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.
Genesis
- Genesis 37:25 יִשְׁמְעֵאלִ֔ים n Gentilic mp They sat down to eat bread, and they lifted up their eyes and looked, and saw a caravan of Ishmaelites was coming from Gilead, with their camels bearing spices and balm and myrrh, going to carry it down to Egypt.
- Genesis 37:27 לַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֗ים prep det + n Gentilic mp Come, and let's sell him to the Ishmaelites, and not let our hand be on him; for he is our brother, our flesh." His brothers listened to him.
- Genesis 37:28 לַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֖ים prep det + n Gentilic mp Midianites who were merchants passed by, and they drew and lifted up Joseph out of the pit, and sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. They brought Joseph into Egypt.
- Genesis 39:1 הַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֔ים ptcl def.art + n Gentilic mp Joseph was brought down to Egypt. Potiphar, an officer of Pharaoh's, the captain of the guard, an Egyptian, bought him from the hand of the Ishmaelites that had brought him down there.
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.
“Ishmaelite” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name ישמעאלי (Yishmâʻêʼlîy). It clusters heavily in Genesis, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. It turns up in 8 verses across 4 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 37:25. See 8-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3459 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 4 verses 50%
- 1 Chronicles 2 verses 25%
- Judges 1 verse 13%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 38%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 13%
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: Ishmeelites 4×
- American Standard Version: Ishmaelites 4×, Ishmaelite 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Ishmaelites 5×, Ishmaelite 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ishmaelites 5×, Ishmaelite 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3459 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H3459 across 8 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3459 across 8 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 H3459 across 8 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.
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Ishmaelite = see Ishmael " God will hear"
- a descendant of Ishmael
Word origin
Derived from ישמעאל (Yishmâʻêʼl) (H3458) — Ishmael.
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.
יִשְׁמְעֵאלִי
- preced.) Ishmaelite, Arab, Bedouin.—Pl. יִשְׁמְעֵאלִים. Ex. R. s. 23 (ref. to אהלי קדר, Cant. I, 5) אהליהם של י׳ the tents of the Bedouins. Gen. R. s. 84; a. fr. e.g. Song of Solomon 1:5
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 H3459 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/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֔ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 39:1 | 1 |
| הַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִֽי | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 2:17 | 1 |
| הַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵלִ֑י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 27:30 | 1 |
| וְ/יִשְׁמְעֵאלִ֗ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 83:6 | 1 |
| יִשְׁמְעֵאלִ֔ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 37:25 | 1 |
| יִשְׁמְעֵאלִ֖ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Judges 8:24 | 1 |
| לַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֖ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 37:28 | 1 |
| לַ/יִּשְׁמְעֵאלִ֗ים | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 37:27 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ishmaelite). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(decendant of Ishmael). [Ishmael]
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
