כִּבְשָׂה
ewe
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (25%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 1 time (13%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3535 appears — 8 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.
Genesis 3 verses
- Genesis 21:28 כִּבְשֹׂ֥ת n c fp cs Abraham set seven ewe lambs of the flock by themselves.
- Genesis 21:29 כְּבָשֹׂת֙ n c fp Abimelech said to Abraham, "What do these seven ewe lambs which you have set by themselves mean?"
- Genesis 21:30 כְּבָשֹׂ֔ת n c fp He said, "You shall take these seven ewe lambs from my hand, that it may be a witness to me, that I have dug this well."
Leviticus 1 verse
Numbers 1 verse
2 Samuel 3 verses
- 2 Samuel 12:3 כִּבְשָׂ֨ה n c fs but the poor man had nothing, except one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and raised. It grew up together with him, and with his children. It ate of his own food, drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was to him like a daughter.
- 2 Samuel 12:4 כִּבְשַׂת֙ n c fs cs A traveler came to the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock and of his own herd, to dress for the wayfaring man who had come to him, but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man who had come to him."
- 2 Samuel 12:6 הַ/כִּבְשָׂ֖ה ptcl def.art + n c fs He shall restore the lamb fourfold, because he did this thing, and because he had no pity!"
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.
At its core, כבשה (kibsâh) means “ewe.” It first appears in Genesis 21:28. It turns up in 8 verses across 4 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Genesis (38%), then 2 Samuel and Leviticus. It clusters with כבש and כשב under a shared root. Dig into 8-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3535 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 →
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) 5 verses · 63%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 38%
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: Ewe lamb 3×, Ewe lambs 3×, Lamb 2×
- American Standard Version: Ewe lambs 3×, Ewe-lamb 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Ewe lambs 3×, Ewe lamb 2×, Lamb 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 2×, Ewe 2×, Ewe lambs 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3535 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3535 across 8 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 H3535 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 H3535 across 12 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.
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.
- ewe-lamb, lamb
Word origin
n.f. ewe-lamb; כִּ׳ 2 S 12:3, 6; כַּ׳ Lv 14:10 Nu 6:14; cstr. כִּבְשַׂת 2 S 12:4; pl. כְּבָשׂת Gn 21:29, 30; cstr. כִּבְשׂת v 28;—ewe-lambs (7) set in witness Gn 21:28, 29, 30 (E); used in sacrif. Lv 14:10 (purif.), Nu 6:14 (Nazirite; both P, and both ‖ כֶּבֶשׂ); for food, in Nathan’s parable 2 S 12:3, 4, 6.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כבש (kebes) (H3532) — lamb.
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.
כַּבְשָׁא
- f. ch. = h. כֶּבֶשׁ 3. Y. B. Kam. IV, 5ᵇ bot.; Y. B. Bath. V, end, 15ᵇ, v. אֲהִינָא
כִּבְשָׂה
- , v. כֶּבֶשׂ. [Y. Ned. VII, beg. 40ᵇ הנודר מן כבשה, read פירות שנה as Tosef. ib. IV, 1.]
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 H3535 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/כִּבְשָׂ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 12:6 | 1 |
| וְ/כַבְשָׂ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 14:10 | 1 |
| וְ/כַבְשָׂ֨ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 6:14 | 1 |
| כְּבָשֹׂ֔ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 21:30 | 1 |
| כְּבָשֹׂת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 21:29 | 1 |
| כִּבְשַׂת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Samuel 12:4 | 1 |
| כִּבְשָׂ֨ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 12:3 | 1 |
| כִּבְשֹׂ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 21:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3535, 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 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.
