מַלְכָּה
queen
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
- 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
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4436 appears in the Book of 1 Kings — 4 distinct verses. 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.
1 Kings
- 1 Kings 10:1 וּ/מַֽלְכַּת conj + n c fs cs When the queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon concerning the name of Yahweh, she came to prove him with hard questions.
- 1 Kings 10:4 מַֽלְכַּת n c fs cs When the queen of Sheba had seen all the wisdom of Solomon, and the house that he had built,
- 1 Kings 10:10 מַֽלְכַּת n c fs cs She gave the king one hundred twenty talents of gold, and of spices very great store, and precious stones: there came no more such abundance of spices as these which the queen of Sheba gave to king Solomon.
- 1 Kings 10:13 לְ/מַֽלְכַּת prep + n c fs cs King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba all her desire, whatever she asked, besides that which Solomon gave her of his royal bounty. So she turned, and went to her own land, she and her servants.
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, מלכה (malkâh) means “queen.” Its uses cluster heavily in Esther (71% of all occurrences). With 34 verses in 4 books, it is a moderately common word in the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in 1 Kings 10:1. Sharing its root, it stands alongside מלך, מלך and מלכא. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4436 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 →
- 34
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 34 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,023
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,023 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 34 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Esther 24 verses 71%
- 1 Kings 4 verses 12%
- 2 Chronicles 4 verses 12%
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 34 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 30 verses · 88%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 12%
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: Queen 31×
- American Standard Version: Queen 30×, Her 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Queen 30×, Now when the queen 2×, Queens 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Queen 25×, Queen of 7×, Queens 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4436 across 35 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4436 across 35 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H4436 across 35 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 H4436 across 35 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.
- queen
Word origin
n.f. queen:—abs. מ׳ Est 1:9 + 24 times Est.; cstr. מַלְכַּת 1 K 10:1 + 7 times; pl. מְלָכוֹת Ct 6:8, 9;—queen of Sheba 1 K 10:1, 4, 10, 13 = 2 Ch 9:1, 3, 9, 12; of Persia, Vashti Est 1:9 + 7 times Est 1; Esther Est 2:22 + 16 times Est 4–9 (in Esther mostly appos. of n.pr.; it precedes n.pr. Est 1:12, 15; follows n.pr. Est 1:9 + 17 times); of Isr. queens only pl. and only Ct 6:8, 9 (both ‖ פִּילַגְשִׁים). Cf. גְּבִירָה.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מלך (melek) (H4428) — king.
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.
מַלְכָּה
- queen, king’s wife. B. Bath. 15ᵇ כל האומר מַלְכַּת שבא וכ׳ whoever says malkath Sheba (I Kings X, 1) means a woman is mistaken; … it means the kingdom (מַלְכֻת) of Sheba. Sabb. 119ᵃ שבת המ׳ the queen Sabbath; a. fr. e.g. 1 Kings 10:1
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 16 distinct written forms H4436 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4436, 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
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- מלך Melek H4429 Melech
- מלכיאל Malkîyʼêl H4439 Malchiel
- מלכיה Malkîyâh H4441 Malchijah
- מלכיצדק Malkîy-Tsedeq H4442 Melchizedek
- מלכירם Malkîyrâm H4443 Malchiram
- מלכישוע Malkîyshûwaʻ H4444 Malchishua
- מלכם Malkâm H4445 Milcom
- מלכה Milkâh H4435 Milcah
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 12 — not the complete family. 8 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 34 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 34 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.
