מוֹעֵצָה
counsel
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 5 times (71%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (29%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4156 appears — 7 distinct verses across 5 books. 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 2 verses
- Psalms 5:10 מִֽ/מֹּעֲצ֪וֹתֵ֫י/הֶ֥ם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 3mp Hold them guilty, God. Let them fall by their own counsels; Thrust them out in the multitude of their transgressions, For they have rebelled against you.
- Psalms 81:12 בְּֽ/מוֹעֲצוֹתֵי/הֶֽם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 3mp So I let them go after the stubbornness of their hearts, That they might walk in their own counsels.
Proverbs 2 verses
Jeremiah 1 verse
Hosea 1 verse
Micah 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.
The Hebrew noun מועצה centers on the idea of “counsel.” Its earliest occurrence is Psalms 5:10. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. Psalms dominates its distribution — 2 of 7 verses. Sharing its root, it stands alongside יעץ, יעט and עצה. Dig into 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4156 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
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: Counsels 3×, Own counsels 3×
- American Standard Version: Own counsels 3×, Counsels 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Own devices 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Counsels 3×, Plans 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4156 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4156 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4156 across 7 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4156 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.
- counsel, plan, principal, device
Word origin
[ מוֹעֵצָה ] n.f. counsel, plan, principle, device
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יעץ (yâʻats) (H3289) — to counsel.
Forms in the corpus
The 7 distinct written forms H4156 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/מ֖וֹעֵצֹ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Proverbs 22:20 | 1 |
| בְּ/מֹ֣עֵצ֔וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 7:24 | 1 |
| בְּ/מֹֽעֲצוֹתָ֑/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Micah 6:16 | 1 |
| בְּֽ/מוֹעֲצוֹתֵי/הֶֽם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 81:12 | 1 |
| וּֽ/מִ/מֹּעֲצֹ֖תֵי/הֶ֣ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Proverbs 1:31 | 1 |
| מִֽ/מֹּעֲצ֖וֹתֵי/הֶֽם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Hosea 11:6 | 1 |
| מִֽ/מֹּעֲצ֪וֹתֵ֫י/הֶ֥ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 5:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4156, 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
