כֶּ֫לַח
Calah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Calah’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H3625 appears — 2 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.
Genesis 2 verses
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.
כלח — transliterated Kelach — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Calah.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (100% of all occurrences). Debuting at Genesis 10:11, it then recurs through the corpus. See 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3625 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 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).
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†: Calah 2×
- American Standard Version†: Calah 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Calah 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Calah 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3625 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3625 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3625 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3625 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 0 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
כלח I poss. firm or rugged strength (v. √ supr.), תָּבוֹא בְכ׳ אֱלֵי־קָ֑בֶר Jb 5
כלח II loc. city in Assyria Gn 10
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
I. n.m. poss. firm or rugged strength (v. √ supr.), תָּבוֹא בְכ׳ אֱלֵי־קָ֑בֶר Jb 5:26 thou shalt come in firm strength (with thy body vigorous, powers unimpaired) unto the grave; עָלֵימוֹ אָבַד כָּ֑לַח 30:2 upon whom vigour has perished.
II. n.pr.loc. city in Assyria Gn 10:11, 12 = Assyrian Kalḫu, SchrCOT ad loc. DlPar 261, mod. Nimrûd, at NE. angle of Upper Zab and Tigris (v. Billerbeck u. Jeremias BASiii. 1895, 130 ff.)
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כלח (kelach) (H3624) — vigor.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H3625 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כָּ֑לַח | Noun, Proper | Genesis 10:12 | 1 |
| כָּֽלַח | Noun, Proper | Genesis 10:11 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Calah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
One of the most ancient cities of Assyria. "Out of that land he [i.e., Nimrod] went forth into Assyria, and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, and Calah, and Resen" (Gen. 10:11, R.V.). Its site is now marked probably by the Nimrud ruins on the left bank of the Tigris. These cover an area of about 1,000 acres, and are second only in size and importance to the mass of ruins opposite Mosul. This city was at one time the capital of the empire, and was the residence of Sardanapalus and his successors down to the time of Sargon, who built a new capital, the modern Khorsabad. It has been conjectured that these four cities mentioned in Gen. 10:11 were afterwards all united into one and called Nineveh (q.v.).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(completion, old age), one of the most ancient cities of Assyria. (Genesis 10:11) The site of Calah is probably market by the Nimrud ruins. If this be regarded as ascertained, Calah must be considered to have been at one time (about B.C. 930-720) the capital of the empire.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
favorable; opportunity
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
