מְלַח
salt
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (67%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4416 appears — 3 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.
Ezra 3 verses
- Ezra 4:14 מְלַ֤ח n c ms cs Now because we eat the salt of the palace, and it is not appropriate for us to see the king's dishonor, therefore have we sent and informed the king;
- Ezra 6:9 מְלַ֣ח n c ms That which they have need of, both young bulls, and rams, and lambs, for burnt offerings to the God of heaven; [also] wheat, salt, wine, and oil, according to the word of the priests who are at Jerusalem, let it be given them day by day without fail;
- Ezra 7:22 וּ/מְלַ֖ח conj + n c ms to one hundred talents of silver, and to one hundred measures of wheat, and to one hundred baths of wine, and to one hundred baths of oil, and salt without prescribing how much.
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.
“salt” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מלח (mᵉlach). A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Ezra. Its earliest occurrence is Ezra 4:14. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4416 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezra 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 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: Salt 2×
- American Standard Version: Salt 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Salt 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Salt 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4416 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4416 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4416 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4416 across 3 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.
- salt
Word origin
Derived from מלח (mᵉlach) (H4415) — to eat salt.
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.
מָלַח
- to salt, brine; esp. (in ritual law) to strew salt on raw meat to resorb its blood. Midd. V, 3 היו מוֹלְחִין עורות וכ׳ they put salt on the hides of sacrifices.—Ḥull. 113ᵃ אלא א"כ מוֹלְחוֹ יפה יפה וכ׳ unless one salts it carefully and washes it thoroughly. Ib. מדיח ומוֹלֵחַ וכ׳ one must first wash the meat, then salt it and again wash it. B. Bath. 74ᵇ ומְלָחָהּ לצדיקים וכ׳ and preserved it in salt for the benefit of the righteous &c. Ḥull. l. c. דג טהור שמְלָחוֹ וכ׳ a clean fish which was salted together with an unclean one; a. fr.—Part. pass. מָלוּחַ (v. מְלִיחַ); pl. מְלוּחִים, מְלוּחִין. Ib. שניהם מ׳ both were salted, opp. תָּפֵל. Yalk. Ps. 887 מ׳ salty secretions.—Y. Taan. IV, 69ᵇ top מיני מ׳ various kinds of salted food. Y. Sabb. I, 3ᶜ bot. מְלוּחֵיהֶן brines prepared by gentiles; a. fr.
- to be strewn with salt. Sifra Vayikra, N’dab., Par. 9, ch. XI שלא הוּמְלְחָה no salt had been put on it.
- same. Part. מְמוּלָּח salted, trnsf. bright. Kidd. 29ᵇ אם היה בנו זריז וממ׳ (Var. וממולא) if his son is eager to learn and bright; [our w. missing in Tosef. Bekh. VI, 10).
מְלַח I
- Targ. Lev. II, 13. Targ. Y. Gen. XXXI, 19.—Sabb. 75ᵇ האי מאן דמ׳ בשרא וכ׳ he who salts raw meat (on the Sabbath) &c. Ḥull. 113ᵃ מ׳ ליה גרמא גרמא salted each piece separately. B. Bath. 74ᵇ לִימְלְחָהּ לנקבה let him preserve in salt the female (Behemoth); a. fr.—Part. pass. מְלִיחַ, מְלִיחָא, pl. מְלִיחֵי. Ib. כוורא מ׳ מעלי fish in salt is good; בשרא מ׳ וכ׳ meat in salt is not.—Ib. ציפרי מ׳ fowls in salt; a. fr.—V. מְלִיחָא.
- to be strewn with salt, be salted. Targ. Ez. XVI, 4.—Ḥull. 112ᵇ. Ib. 97ᵇ אִימְּלִיחוּ וכ׳ were (ritually) salted … with the nervus ischiadicus left therein; a. fr.
מְלַח II
- (denom. of מַלָּח) to row; to balance. Keth. 85ᵃ מְמַלַּח מַלּוּחֵי (not מימלח) rowed the boat (as an act of possession). B. Kam. 117ᵇ מ׳ ביה חד מינייהו (Alf.) one of them tried to keep the boat in balance (against the ass that threatened to upset it); [ed. מַ׳ ליה לחמרא (Var. מלא, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 90) he tried to counterbalance the ass].
מֶלַח
- c. (b. h.; [brittle,] salt. Ker. 6ᵃ; B. Bath. 20ᵇ מ׳ סדומית (sub. ארץ) sea-salt, v. אִסְתְּרוֹקָנִית. Ḥull. 112ᵃ נאכל מחמת מִלְחוֹ is eaten on account of (with) the salt it has absorbed. Keth. 66ᵇ (prov.) מ׳ ממון חֶסֶר וא"ל חסד the salt (means of preservation) of wealth is its diminution (by charitable deeds), and some say ḥesed (benevolence). Gen. R. s. 51 חטאה במ׳ she (Lot’s wife) sinned through salt; הולכת … תנו לי מ׳ מ׳ she went to all her neighbors and said, give me salt for we have guests; a. fr.
מֶלַח ²
- Targ. Lev. II, 13 מַלַח constr. ed. Berl. (Var. מָ׳, מְ׳, v. Berl. Targ. O. II, p. 32; Y. מֶ׳). Targ. II Chr. XIII, 5. Targ. Y. Gen. XIX, 26 (v. Gen. R. s. 51 quot. in preced.); a. fr.—Kidd. 62ᵃ; Ḥull. 113ᵃ, v. גְּלַלְנִיתָא. Bekh. 8ᵇ מ׳ כי סרי וכ׳ when salt becomes unsavory, wherewith do they salt it? B. Bath. 74ᵇ מִלְחָהּ מעלי (differ. vers. in Ms. M., v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) as to the female (Behemoth), its brine is more savory. Yeb. 63ᵃ, v. חֲפוּרָה II; a. fr.—Pl. מִלְחֵי, מִי׳. Pes. 8ᵃ בי מ׳ salt-store. Ab. Zar. 33ᵃ שדא חמרא לבי מ׳ דישראל poured wine into a Jew’s salt-store (Rashi: a vessel filled with salt).
מַלָּח
- cmp. meaning of ἅλς a. mariner, sailor. Koh. R. to IX, 8.
מְלִיחַ
- (מָלַח)
- 1. preserved in salt, pickled. Ḥull. 113ᵃ (בשר) מ׳ salted meat, opp. תָּפֵל. Ib. 97ᵇ, a. fr. מ׳ … כרותח what is preserved in salt, is ritually to be considered as if boiled or roasted; a. fr.—[Pl., v. מָלַח.]
- 2. salted relish, dessert. Ber. VI, 7. Ib. 44ᵃ כל סעודה שאין בה מ׳ וכ׳ Ms. M. (ed. מלח, corr. acc.; v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) a meal without salted preserves is no meal.
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 3 distinct written forms H4416 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/מְלַ֖ח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezra 7:22 | 1 |
| מְלַ֣ח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezra 6:9 | 1 |
| מְלַ֤ח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezra 4:14 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
