מַלְאַךְ
angel
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4398 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 3:28 מַלְאֲכֵ/הּ֙ n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms Nebuchadnezzar spoke and said, Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who has sent his angel, and delivered his servants who trusted in him, and have changed the king's word, and have yielded their bodies, that they might not serve nor worship any god, except their own God.
- Daniel 6:22 מַלְאֲכֵ֗/הּ n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms My God has sent his angel, and has shut the lions' mouths, and they have not hurt me; because as before him innocence was found in me; and also before you, O king, have I done no hurt.
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.
“angel” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מלאך (malʼak). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. Scripture first uses it in Daniel 3:28. It shares a root with מלאך, מלאכה and מלאכות. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4398 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 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: Angel 2×
- American Standard Version: Angel 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Angel 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Angel 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4398 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4398 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4398 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4398 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- angel
Word origin
Derived from מלאך (mălʼâk) (H4397) — messenger.
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.
מַלְאָךְ
- לאך to work, messenger, esp. angel. Gen. R. s. 50 אין מ׳ אחד עושה וכ׳ one angel never performs two missions. Snh. 96ᵃ אותו מ׳ שנזדמן וכ׳ the name of the angel that came to Abraham was Night. Gen. R. s. 9 מַלְאַךְ חיים angel of life. Ib., a. fr. מ׳ המות (abbrev. מה"מ) angel of death; a. v. fr.—Pl. מַלְאָכִים. Gen. R. s. 50 ולא שני מ׳ וכ׳ nor do two angels go on one mission. Ib. נדמו לו בדמות מ׳ they appeared to him as angels. Ib. משעשו שליחותן קראן מ׳ after they have done their mission, the text calls them messengers. Y. R. Hash. I, 56ᵈ bot. אף שמות המ׳ עלו וכ׳ the names of the angels, too, came (to Palestine) with them (the exiles) from Babylonia; Gen. R. s. 48.—מַלְאֲכֵי (ה)שרת (abbrev. מה"ש, מ"ה) the ministering angels. Sabb. 55ᵇ תנא דמ"ה the teacher who said (ib. top) that the angels asked the Lord &c. Ned. 20ᵃ ד׳ דברים סחו לי מ"ה four things did the ministering angels tell me; ib. 20ᵇ מאן מ"ה רבנן ‘the ministering angels’ means teachers; מ"ה ממש ministering angels in the true sense.—Tosef. Sabb. XVII (XVIII), 3 מַלְאֲכֵי שטן messengers of hindrance, opp. to מה"ש.—Y. Shebu. VI, 37ᵃ bot., a. fr. מלאכי חבלה, v. חַבָּלָה.—Ḥag. 5ᵇ, a. fr. מלאכי (ה)שלום the angels of peace; a. v. fr.
מַלְאָךְ ²
- Targ. Y. I Ex. IV, 25; a. fr.—Pl. מַלְאָכַיָּא, מַלְאָכִין, מַלְאָכֵי. Targ. Gen. XIX, 1; a. fr.—B. Bath. 75ᵃ פליגי תרי מ׳ ברקיע וכ׳ two angels in heaven, Michael and Gabriel, differ. Ib. חזא מ׳ שרת וכ׳ he saw ministering angels sitting &c. Koh. R. to IX, 11 (ref. to Ps. LXVIII, 13) אפי׳ מלכיהון דמ׳ וכ׳ even the chiefs of the angels, Michael and Gabriel, were afraid of Moses. Taan. 24ᵇ, v. מַלָּחָא; a. fr. e.g. Psalms 68:13
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 2 distinct written forms H4398 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מַלְאֲכֵ/הּ֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 3:28 | 1 |
| מַלְאֲכֵ֗/הּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Daniel 6:22 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4398, 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
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 5 — 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 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
