לוּל
staircase
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H3883 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.
1 Kings 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.
At its core, לול (lûwl) means “staircase.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in 1 Kings (100% of all occurrences). It occurs only once, in 1 Kings 6:8. Sharing its root, it stands alongside ליל and ללאה. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3883 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
- 1 Kings 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: Winding stairs 1×
- American Standard Version: Winding stairs 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Stairway 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Stairs 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3883 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3883 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3883 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3883 across 2 tagged occurrences — 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.
- staircase, winding stair, shaft or enclosed space with steps or ladder
Word origin
[ לוּל ] n.[m.] shaft or enclosed space (poss. in wall), with steps or ladder, only pl. 1 K 6:8
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to fold back
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.
לול
- a word in an incantation against thirst. Pes. 112ᵃ (Ms. M. ליל).
לוּל
- לעל, apocop. of לעלע = עלעל, cmp. formation of כֶּסֶךְ; cmp. עָלל, עִלְעוֹל, עִלְעֵל I)
- 1. winding pathway, passage way, esp. a small room with a staircase leading up to the upper rooms (v. Sm. Ant. s. v. House, Amer. ed. 1858, p. 519ᵃ). Men. 34ᵃ ל׳ פתוח מן הבית לעליה a small room opening (leading) from the ground floor to the upper room. Pes. 34ᵃ ל׳ קטן היה וכ׳ there was a small passage way between the graded ascent (כֶּבֶשׁ) and the altar; ib. 77ᵃ (Zeb. 62ᵇ אויר; ib. 104ᵃ ריוח).—Pl. לוּלִים, לוּלִין. Y. Erub. VII, beg. 24ᵇ מהו לערב דרך ל׳ how about connecting two dwellings for Sabbath purposes by the way of the staircases (leading to the roofs)?—Y. Yoma I, 38ᶜ; Y. Meg. IV, 75ᶜ bot. ל׳ אלו ע"ג אלו וכ׳ staircases above each other (well-hole) require M’zuzah, (to be furnished by him) who has the right of use of the lower threshold. Pes. 8ᵃ; Yoma 11ᵃ ל׳ ומתבן the staircase rooms and the provision room; [comment. refer to Nr. 3, v. infra]. Midd. IV, 5; Pes. 26ᵃ ול׳ היו פתוחין וכ׳ there were small passages in the loft leading to the Holy of Holies through which mechanics were lowered in boxes (closed elevators).
- 2. (anat.) a passage from the vestibulum vaginae (פרוזדור). Nidd. 17ᵇ, v. עֲלִיָּיה.
- 3. ל׳ של תרנגולים hen-roost. Sabb. 102ᵇ העושה נקב בל׳ וכ׳ he who makes a hole (for ventilation) in a hen-roost; ib. 146ᵃ משום ל׳ של וכ׳ in order to prevent making a hole in a hen-roost which is done for ventilation. Ib. 122ᵇ; a. e.—Pl. as ab. Pes. 8ᵃ; Yoma 11ᵃ ל׳ ומתבן hen-roosts &c., v. supra.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3883, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
