מְחוֹלָה
dance
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.
- 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).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4246 appears in the Book of Song of Solomon — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Song of Solomon
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, מחלה (mᵉchôlâh) means “dance.” Scripture first uses it in Exodus 15:20. It turns up in 8 verses across 4 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to 1 Samuel (38%), then Exodus and Judges. Dig into 8-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4246 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 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 8 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 63%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 25%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 13%
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: Dances 4×, Dancing 2×
- American Standard Version: Dances 4×, Dancing 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Dancing 4×, Dances 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Dances 5×, Dancing 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4246 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4246 across 8 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 H4246 across 8 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 H4246 across 8 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.
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.
- dancing, dance
Word origin
[ מְחוֹלָה ] n.f. id. [ h.bf.al ]; dancing
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מחשבה (machăshâbâh) (H4284) — thought.
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.
מְחִלָּה
- cavity, cave. Mekh. B’shall., Amal., s. 2 let me enter the land במְחִילַּת קסריון by the cave Caesarion (Sifré Num. 135 דרך חלל). Tosef. Yeb. XIV, 6 מ׳ של דגים an underground fish pond; Yeb. 121ᵃ; a. fr.—Pl. מְחִלּוֹת, מְחִי׳. Tosef. Kel. B. Kam. I, 11 מ׳ שתחת וכ׳ the underground places under the Temple are not sacred area; Pes. 86ᵃ. Ib.; Tam. 27ᵇ, a. e. מ׳ לא נתקדשו the caves under the Temple have not been consecrated. Keth. 111ᵃ מ׳ נעשות וכ׳ underground passages are made for them (v. גִּלְגּוּל). Ib. שמא לא יזכה למ׳ perhaps he will not be privileged to pass underground. Gen. R. s. 96; a. e.—Pl. m. מְחִילִּים, מְחִילִּין. Pesik. R. s. 31. Gen. R. s. 1, beg. והאדם עשוי מ׳ מ׳ וכ׳ man’s body is made with many channels and cavities; Yalk. Ps. 835. Sifré Deut. 319 (play on מחללך, Deut. XXXII, 18) שעשאך מ׳ מ׳ who made thee full of cavities; Num. R. s. 9, beg. עשית … מ׳ מ׳ אלו וכ׳ I built you with many cavities, that means the hearts and the kidneys. e.g. Deuteronomy 32:18
מַחֲלָה
- sickness. Mekh. B’shall., Vayassa, s. 1 (ref. to Ex. XV, 26) (הא) אם אין בהם מ׳ וכ׳ if there is to be no sickness among them, what healing will they need? B. Mets. 107ᵇ; B. Kam. 92ᵇ מ׳ זו מרה ‘the sickness’ means (affection of) the bile &c., v. חָלָה. e.g. Exodus 15:26
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 8 distinct written forms H4246 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַ/מְּחֹלוֹת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 21:11 | 1 |
| בַּ/מְּחֹל֖וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 29:5 | 1 |
| בַּ/מְּחֹלוֹת֒ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Judges 21:21 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/מְּחֹל֔וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 18:6 | 1 |
| וּ/בִ/מְחֹל֑וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Judges 11:34 | 1 |
| וּ/בִ/מְחֹלֹֽת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 15:20 | 1 |
| וּ/מְחֹלֹ֑ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 32:19 | 1 |
| כִּ/מְחֹלַ֖ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Song of Solomon 6:13 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
