לָחֶם
war
‘war’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- 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
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3901 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.
Judges 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.
לחם (lâchem) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “war.” It occurs a mere 1 verse across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Judges, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Its lone occurrence is Judges 5:8. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. 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 H3901 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
- Judges 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: Was war 1×
- American Standard Version: Was war 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: War 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fighting 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3901 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3901 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3901 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3901 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- war
- meaning uncertain
Word origin
n.[m.] only in אָז לֶחֶ֣ם שְׁעָרִים Ju 5:8 (so Mass; Codd. לָחֵ֣ם, לָ֣חֶם), usually tr. then was there war of (= at) the gates, but improb.; text and meaning dub.; A𝔊L read ὡς ἄρτον κρίθινον, whence BuRS 103 אָז לָחֶם שְׂעֹרִים then they used to eat barley bread; but BuComm. אָזַל ל׳ שׂ׳ the barley bread was exhausted; Mayer LambertRÉJ xxx, 115 אז לחמשׁ ערים then for (in) 5 cities no shield was seen, etc.; other conj. in KauAT; cf. GFMad loc.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from לחם (lâcham) (H3898) — to fight.
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.
לָחַם I
- (cmp. לוּחַ), to join, or to be joined, be inserted.
- to fit, insert; to tenon. Y. Sabb. XII, 13ᶜ המַלְחִים את וכ׳ he who inserts the shutters (of a shop); Y. Bets. I, 60ᶜ המלחם (corr. acc.). Cant. R. to V, 12; ib. to IV, 15, v. לְחִי. Lev. R. s. 3 (ref. to the harmonious parallelism of Is. LV, 7) כאדם שהוא מלחים שני נסרים ומדביקן זה לזה as one fits (with tenon and mortise) two boards and glues them to one another; כאדם שהוא מ׳ שתי כרעי המטה (leave out ומדביקן זה לזה, v. Ar. s. v. מלח) as one inserts two legs of a bedstead. e.g. Isaiah 55:7
לָחַם II
- v. preced.) to join.
- (cmp. use of זָוַג Nithpa.) to come in (hostile) contact, to battle; with ל of person, to assist, battle for. Mekh. B’shall. 2 (ref. to Ex. XIV, 14) לא … יִלָּחֵם לכם אלא לעולם ילחם כנגדן וכ׳ not only this time will he assist you, but he will always battle against your enemies. Tanḥ. Masé 6 כשהלך להִלָּחֵם בישראל when he (Sisera) went to war against &c. Ib. Vayera 7 (ref. בלחומו, Job XX, 23) על המלחמות שהיו נִלְחָמִים עם וכ׳ for the battles which they fought against the Lord; a. fr. e.g. Exodus 14:14
- to contest, dispute. Y. M. Kat. III, 81ᵈ top אם חברים מִתְלַחֲמִים וכ׳ if scholars are at variance with one another, what concern is it to you? (B. Mets. 59ᵇ מנצחים זה את זה וכ׳).
לֶחֶם
- fr. לחח to chew, v. Ges. H. Dict.10 s. v. לוע) food, bread; [Arab. meat]. Ber. V, 1 the benediction over bread (פת) reads: המוציא ל׳ וכ׳ who makest food grow out of the earth; ib. 37ᵇ. Men. XI, 1 שתי הל׳ (sub. ככרות) the two loaves of bread (Lev. XXIII, 17). Ib. ל׳ הפנים the show-bread (on the table of the Sanctuary); a. fr.—Trnsf. tribute, tax, salary (cmp. annona). Ruth R. to II, 14 זו לַחְמָהּ של מלכות that is (thou shalt partake of) the royal maintenance. Zeb. 85ᵃ; Meïl. 7ᵇ לַחְמוֹ של מזבח the tribute belonging to the altar (cmp. Lev. XXI, 6; 8; Neh. V, 14).—Pl. לְחָמִים. Y. Ḥag. III, end, 79ᵈ שני ל׳ two sets of show-bread, opp. to לחם אחד. e.g. Leviticus 23:17
לְחֵם
- 1. same. Targ. Gen. XIV, 18. Ib. XLIII, 31; a. fr.—Snh. 100ᵇ (from Ben Sira) אמר במאי איכול ל׳ ל׳ סב מיניה if a man says, ‘wherewith shall I eat bread (to season it)?’, take the bread from him. Ab. Zar. 35ᵇ ל׳ דארמאי (Ms. M. נהמא) bread baked by gentiles, v. פַּת. Ber. 42ᵇ ניזיל וניכול ל׳ וכ׳ (Ms. M. נהמא) let us go and dine at a certain place; a. fr.
- 2. meat, flesh. Ex. R. s. 42 (ref. to לחמם, Zeph. I, 17) בערביא קורין לבשרא ל׳ in Arabia they call meat laḥma e.g. Zephaniah 1:17
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 H3901, 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 → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 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.
