כָּחַל
to paint
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3583 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Ezekiel 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.
כחל (kâchal) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to paint.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Ezekiel dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. It occurs only once, in Ezekiel 23:40. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3583 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezekiel 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Thyself paintedst 1×
- American Standard Version: Thyself 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Painted 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Painted 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3583 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3583 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3583 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3583 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- (Qal) to paint (eyes), adorn with paint
Word origin
[ כָּחַל ] vb. paint (eyes)—only in Ez 23:40
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
כֹּחָל
- , v. כּוֹתָל
כָּחַל
- to paint the eyelids (for medical or for cosmetic purposes). Sabb. VIII, 3 (78ᵇ) כדי לִכְחוֹל וכ׳ a quantity sufficient for painting one eye. Sabb. 80ᵃ צנועות כּוֹחֲלוֹת וכ׳ chaste (veiled) women paint only one eye. Ib. X, 6 הכּוֹחֶלֶת she who paints her eyes (on the Sabbath); a. fr.—Part. pass. כָּחוּל; f. כְּחוּלָה, pl. כְּחוּלוֹת. Gen. R. s. 98 (play on ח̇כ̇ל̇ילי, Gen. XLIX, 12) שעיניהם כ̇ח̇ול̇ות וכ̇ח̇ם יפה וכ׳ whose eyes are bright as if painted, and whose abilities for study are fine. [Y. Sabb. VII, 10ᵃ top להכחיל, מכחיל, v. בָּחַל II.] e.g. Genesis 49:12
כְּחַל I
- 1. same. Targ. II Kings IX, 30; a. e.—Sabb. 80ᵃ עין … הא לא כַחֲלֵי but people never paint one eye only!
- 2. (ironically, v. infra) to blind the eyes. Ber. 58ᵃ חברוהי כַחְלִינְהוּ וכ׳ his associates put his eyes out, v. כְּבִי.—[Y. Ab. Zar. II, 40ᵈ top כחל לה, read in one w., v. חֲלָלָא.]
- to be painted. Nidd. 55ᵇ if one desires to become blind, לִיכְּחוֹל מארמאי (מעכ"ום) let him have his eyes painted by gentiles; Y. Ab. Zar. l. c. מִיכְּחוּל מינהון.
כָּחָל
- (tradit. pronunc. כְּחַל) m. (prob. from its reddish color, v. כַּחֲלֵי) udder, bag. Ḥull. VIII, 3. Tosef. ib. VIII, 8 כ׳ של מניקה the bag of a milk-cow; a. fr.
כְּחַל II
- [Targ. Ps. LXXIV, 6 some ed., read כַּחֲרָא.]—Ḥull. 110ᵃ תבשילא דכחלא Ar. (ed. דכחל) a dish made of udder.—Pl. כַּחֲלֵי. Ib. בסורא … כ׳ in Sura they do not eat udders. Ib. אפקינהו כ"ע לכַחְלַיְיהוּ (not לכחלינהו) all of them brought out the udders they were about to cook.
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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
