מְלֶ֫כֶת
queen
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4446 appears — 5 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.
Jeremiah 5 verses
- Jeremiah 7:18 לִ/מְלֶ֣כֶת prep + n c fs cs The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of the sky, and to pour out drink-offerings to other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.
- Jeremiah 44:17 לִ/מְלֶ֣כֶת prep + n c fs cs But we will certainly perform every word that is gone forth out of our mouth, to burn incense to the queen of the sky, and to pour out drink-offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then had we plenty of food, and were well, and saw no evil.
- Jeremiah 44:18 לִ/מְלֶ֧כֶת prep + n c fs cs But since we left off burning incense to the queen of the sky, and pouring out drink-offerings to her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.
- Jeremiah 44:19 לִ/מְלֶ֣כֶת prep + n c fs cs When we burned incense to the queen of the sky, and poured out drink-offerings to her, did we make her cakes to worship her, and pour out drink-offerings to her, without our husbands?
- Jeremiah 44:25 לִ/מְלֶ֣כֶת prep + n c fs cs Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, saying, You and your wives have both spoken with your mouths, and with your hands have fulfilled it, saying, We will surely perform our vows that we have vowed, to burn incense to the queen of the sky, and to pour out drink-offerings to her: establish then your vows, and perform your vows.
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, מלכת (mᵉleketh) means “queen.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Jeremiah (100% of all occurrences). It first appears in Jeremiah 7:18. Sharing its root, it stands alongside מלך, מלוכה and מלך. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4446 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 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: Queen 5×
- American Standard Version: Queen 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Queen 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Queen of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4446 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4446 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4446 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4446 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- queen
Word origin
Derived from מלך (mâlak) (H4427) — to reign.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H4446 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לִ/מְלֶ֣כֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 7:18 | 4 |
| לִ/מְלֶ֧כֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 44:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4446, 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
- מלוכה mᵉlûwkâh H4410 kingship
- מלך melek H4428 king
- מלך mᵉlak H4431 counsel
- מלכות malkûwth H4438 kingdom
- ממלכה mamlâkâh H4467 kingdom
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- ימלך Yamlêk H3230 Jamlech
- מלוך Mallûwk H4409 Malluch
- מלך Môlek H4432 Molech
- מלכת Môleketh H4447 Hammoleketh
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 11 — not the complete family. 4 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 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
