מֶגְרָפָה
shovel
‘shovel’ 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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4053 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.
Joel 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.
מגרפה (migrâphâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “shovel.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. It clusters heavily in Joel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Its lone occurrence is Joel 1:17. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4053 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
- Joel 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: Under their clods 1×
- American Standard Version: Under their clods 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Clods 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Clods 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4053 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4053 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4053 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4053 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.
- shovel
- clod (that thrown by a shovel) (possible)
Word origin
[ מֶגְרָפָה ] n.f. shovel only pl. Jo 1:17
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from גרף (gâraph) (H1640) — to sweep away.
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.
מַגְרֵפָה
- (preced.)
- 1. spoon, ladle; trowel. Kel. XXIX, 8 מ׳ של ב"ב the ladle of the household (v. Maim. a. l.); מ׳ של סיידים the plasterers’ trowel. Tanḥ. Sh’moth 9 של טיט the trowel for clay; Ex. R. s. 1 (some ed. מַגְרֵיפוֹ של טיט, v. preced.). Kel. XIII, 4 מ׳ ladle (v. Maim. a. l.).
- 2. (usu. in connection with סל) spade used for digging and shovelling; shovel. Gen. R. s. 16; Sifré Deut. 6, a. e., v. פְּרָת.—Tosef. Toh. VIII, 13; Zeb. 99ᵇ. Sabb. XVII, 2 מ׳ לגרוף וכ׳ one may handle a spade (on the Sabbath) for grabbing &c., v. גָּרַף. Num. R. s. 15; Yalk. Ex. 163. Lev. R. s. 23; Cant. R. to IV, 8 היא והסל והמ׳ וכ׳ it (the Torah) and all its implements, v. אֶרְגַּלְיָא.—Y. Ḥag. II, 78ᵇ bot. מ׳ של מתכת an iron spade (flat); מ׳ של עץ a wooden shovel; a. e.—Pl. מַגְרֵפוֹת, מַגְרֵי׳. B. Mets. 30ᵃ. Tam. II, 1. Gen. R. s. 46, beg.; a. e.
- 3. magrefah, a) name of a musical instrument in the Temple. Arakh. 10ᵇ; Y. Succ. V, 55ᵈ top.—b) name of a sort of tympanum. Tam. V, 6, Ib. III, 8; Y. l. c. 55ᵇ bot.
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 H4053, 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 → 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.
