אַיָּלָה
doe
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 5 times (63%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 2 times (25%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 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 H355 appears — 8 distinct verses across 6 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 1 verse
2 Samuel 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Psalms 2 verses
Song of Solomon 2 verses
- Song of Solomon 2:7 בְּ/אַיְל֣וֹת prep + n c fp cs I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, or by the hinds of the field, That you not stir up, nor awaken love, Until it so desires.
- Song of Solomon 3:5 בְּ/אַיְל֣וֹת prep + n c fp cs I adjure you, daughters of Jerusalem, By the roes, or by the hinds of the field, That you not stir up, nor awaken love, Until it so desires.
Habakkuk 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.
אילה — transliterated ʼayâlâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “doe.” It first appears in Genesis 49:21. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 8 verses — uncommon. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Psalms. Related forms include איל, אילת and אילון. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H355 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.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 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
- Psalms 2 verses 25%
- Song of Solomon 2 verses 25%
- Genesis 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 63%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 25%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Hinds 3×, Like hinds' 2×
- American Standard Version†: Hinds 4×, Like hinds 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Doe 4×, Like those of a deer 3×, Does 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Deer 2×, Does of 2×, Like a deer 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H355 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H355 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 H355 across 11† 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H355 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.
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.
- doe, deer, hind
Word origin
n.f. hind, doe—א׳ abs. Gn 49:21 (but read אֵילָה v. infr.); אַיֶּ֫לֶת Je 14:5; cstr. אַיֶּ֫לֶת ψ 22:1 Pr 5:19; pl. אַיָּלוֹת ψ 29:9 + 4 times; cstr. אַיְלוֹת Ct 2:7; 3:5—hind, doe, as calving Jb 39:1 (חֹלֵל א׳ ‖ לֶדֶת יַעֲלֵי סָ֑לַע) cf. ψ 29:9 קוֹל יָ׳ יְחוֹלֵל א׳; in adjuration בִּצְבָאוֹת אוֹ בְּא׳ הַשָּׂדֶה Ct 2:7; 3:5; in sim. מְשַׁיֶּה רַגְלַי כָּא ψ 18:34; = 2 S 22:34 cf. וַיָּשֶׂם ר׳ כָּא׳ Hb 3:19 i.e. surefooted, secure, cf. ‖ וְעַל בָּמֹתַי יַעֲמִידֵנִי ψ 18:34 2 S 22:34; so Hb 3:19 but vb. יַדְרִכֵנִי; metaph. of Naphtali Gn 49:21 א׳ שְׁלֻחָה, but read אִילָה, cf. sub i. אֵלָה; in name of a melody ψ 22:1 עַל־אַיֶּלֶת הַשַּׁחַר cf. De, & for hind as fig. of dawn Yom.29 a.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from איל (ʼayâl) (H354) — stag.
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.
אֵילַהּ
- v. אֱלָהּ
אַיָּלָה
- 1. hind, roe. B. Bath. 16ᵇ top א׳ רחמה צר the hind has a narrow womb (vagina).
- 2. mostly אילת השחר the first rays (climber) of the morning dawn; cmp. Yoma 29ᵃ. Y. Ber. I, 2ᶜ; a. fr.; (cmp. Gen. XIX, 15 השחר עלה). e.g. Genesis 19:15
אֱלָהּ
- (= h. אֱלוֹהַּ) God. Dan. III, 28; a. fr.—Targ. O. Deut. XXXIII, 26; a. fr.—Lev. R. s. 5, end את אלה רב Ar. (ed. אלוה). Y. B. Mets. II, 8ᶜ אלההון דיהודאי the God of the Jews. Y. Snh. X, 28ᵇ.—Pl. (also plur. majest.) אֱלָהִין. Dan. II, 11; a. e.—אֱלָהַיָּא. Jer. X, 11. Targ. Ps. CXXXVI, 2 אלהי אלהיא the God of gods. [Gen. R. s. 26 כומריא גנבו א׳ וכ׳ (read אלהון) when priests rob—who would swear by their god?] Ib. (ref. to Gen. VI, 2).—Lev. R. s. 33 תמן קריין … אֱלָהַיָּיא there (in Rome) they call their kings gods. e.g. Daniel 3:28
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 6 distinct written forms H355 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/אַיְל֣וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Song of Solomon 2:7 | 2 |
| כָּ/אַיָּל֑וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Samuel 22:34 | 2 |
| אַיָּל֣וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Job 39:1 | 1 |
| אַיָּלָ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 49:21 | 1 |
| אַיָּלוֹת֮ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 29:9 | 1 |
| כָּֽ/אַיָּל֔וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Habakkuk 3:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H355, 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
Derived from this word
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 7 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.
