מְגִלָּה
scroll
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
- Singular
- One.
4 distinct verses where H4039 appears in the Construct state, across 3 books. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Psalms 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 36:2 מְגִלַּת n c fs cs Take a scroll of a book, and write therein all the words that I have spoken to you against Israel, and against Judah, and against all the nations, from the day I spoke to you, from the days of Josiah, even to this day.
- Jeremiah 36:4 מְגִלַּת n c fs cs Then Jeremiah called Baruch the son of Neriah; and Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of Yahweh, which he had spoken to him, on a scroll of a book.
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.
“scroll” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מגלה (mᵉgillâh). More than half of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. It appears 19 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. First canonically at Psalms 40:7, it enters the text early. Where the King James Version says “roll,” newer translations reach for “scroll” (Berean Standard Bible); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4039 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 →
- 19
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 19 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,462
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,462 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 19 occurrences in the concordance →
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 19 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 18 verses · 95%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 5%
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: Roll 17×
- American Standard Version: Roll 14×
- Berean Standard Bible: Scroll 20×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Scroll 3×, Flying scroll 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4039 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H4039 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H4039 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H4039 across 7 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.
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.
- roll, book, writing
Word origin
n.f. roll (writing, book; late)—מ׳ Je 36:28 + 16 times; cstr. מְגִלַּת־ ψ 40:8 + 3 times;—roll of writing, book מְגִלַּת־סֵפֶר Je 36:2, 4 Ez 2:9 ψ 40:8; מ׳ alone Je 36:6, 14(×2), 20, 21, 23, 25, 27, 28(×2), 29, 32 Ez 3:1, 2, 3 Zc 5:1, 2.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from גלל (gâlal) (H1556) — to roll.
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.
מְגִלָּה
- roll, scroll, volume, part of a סֵפֶר. Treat. Sof’rim V, 9 אין עושין שמע (או)הלל מ׳ וכ׳ you must not prepare the section of Sh’ma or of Hallel as a special volume for children; Gitt. 60ᵃ מהו לכתוב מ׳ וכ׳, v. לָמַד; Yoma 37ᵇ. Gitt. l. c. תורה מ׳ מ׳ ניתנה the Pentateuch was published in sections, opp. חתומה. Deut. R. s. 8 תחלה קורא במ׳ when beginning, the student reads (the Pentateuch) in a detached scroll, opp. בספר.—Y. Shek. V, 49ᵃ; Yoma 38ᵃ; Cant. R. to III, 6 מְגִלַּת ס(מ)מנין a volume containing prescriptions for frankincense; a. fr.—מ׳ יוחסין, מ׳ סתרים מגלת אסתר, &c., v. respect. determinants.—Pl. מְגִלּוֹת, מְגִילּוֹת. Cant. R. l. c. היו מוסרין מְגִילּוֹתָם וכ׳ they handed over their rolls (containing the prescriptions) one to the other; (Y. Shek. l. c. את המגלה הזאת).—Esp. (הַ)מְּגִלָּה = מגלת אסתר, a. אֶסְתֵּר. Meg. I, 1. Ib. 19ᵃ מ׳ נקראת ספר the book of Esther is called a book and also a letter. Ib., sq. הקורא במ׳ הכתובה בין וכ׳ he who recites from a Book of Esther as written among the Hagiographa (instead of using a special scroll); a. v. fr.—M’gillah, name of a treatise of the Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmud Babli a. Y’rushalmi, treating chiefly of the Festival of Purim.—M’gilloth, the five books: Esther, Ruth, Canticum, Lamentations and Koheleth.
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 12 distinct written forms H4039 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 3:1 | 3 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:14 | 3 |
| מְגִלַּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 2:9 | 3 |
| מְגִלָּ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:28 | 3 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:21 | 2 |
| בַ/מְּגִלָּ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:6 | 1 |
| בִּ/מְגִלַּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 40:7 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:25 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:14 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֤ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 36:29 | 1 |
| הַ/מְּגִלָּ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 3:2 | 1 |
| מְגִלָּ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Zechariah 5:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4039, 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
- גל gal H1530 wave
- גל gôl H1531 bowl, basin
- גלגל galgal H1534 whirlwind
- גלגלת gulgôleth H1538 skull
- גלה gullâh H1543 bowl
- גלול gillûwl H1544 idols
- גליל gâlîyl H1550 circuit
- גלל gâlâl H1557 dung
- גלל gâlâl H1558 on account of
- גלל gᵉlâl H1560 rolling
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 → Showing 4 of 14 — not the complete family. 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 16 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 19 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.
