מַעֲלָל
deed
‘deed’ is one of 4 main senses fuller range ↓
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4611 appears in the Book of Psalms — 5 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.
Psalms
- Psalms 28:4 מַֽעַלְלֵ֫י/הֶ֥ם n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp Give them according to their work, and according to the wickedness of their doings. Give them according to the operation of their hands. Bring back on them what they deserve.
- Psalms 77:11 מַֽעַלְלֵי n c mp cs I will remember Yah's deeds; For I will remember your wonders of old.
- Psalms 78:7 מַֽעַלְלֵי n c mp cs That they might set their hope in God, And not forget the works of God, But keep his commandments,
- Psalms 106:29 בְּ/מַֽעַלְלֵי/הֶ֑ם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp Thus they provoked him to anger with their deeds. The plague broke in on them.
- Psalms 106:39 בְּ/מַֽעַלְלֵי/הֶֽם prep + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp Thus were they defiled with their works, And prostituted themselves in their deeds.
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, מעלל (maʻălâl) means “deed.” Translators differ — “doings” in the King James Version, then “deeds” (Berean Standard Bible), as the renderings breakdown shows. It turns up in 41 verses across 12 books, a moderately common footprint. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (41%), then Psalms and Hosea. Ranging over 4 senses, it is not a single-sense word. 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 H4611 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 →
- 41
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 41 distinct verses.
- 12 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 12 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #837
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 837 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 41 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 41 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 33 verses · 80%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 17%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 2%
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: Doings 30×, Works 3×
- American Standard Version: Doings 30×, Works 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Deeds 25×, Works 3×, Actions 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Deeds 31×, Actions 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4611 across 41 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H4611 across 41 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 H4611 across 40 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4611 across 40 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in BDB
The 4 senses 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.
- deed, practice
- practice (usually bad)
- deeds
- acts
Word origin
[ מַעֲלָל ] 41 n.m. deed, practice
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עלל (ʻâlal) (H5953) — to act severely.
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.
מַעֲלָל
- [bringing about,] deed. — Pl. מַעֲלָלִים. Midr. Till. to Ps. LXII, 13 מַעֲלָלָיו הרעים his evil deeds.
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 33 distinct written forms H4611 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 H4611, 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
- על ʻôl H5923 yoke
- עליל ʻălîyl H5948 furnace
- עלילה ʻălîylâh H5949 wantonness
- עלל ʻălal H5954 to go in
- עללה ʻôlêlâh H5955 gleaning
- תעלול taʻălûwl H8586 vexation
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 39 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 41 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
- Deuteronomy 28:20
- Judges 2:19
- 1 Samuel 25:3
- Psalms 28:4
- Proverbs 20:11
- Isaiah 1:16
- Jeremiah 4:4
- Ezekiel 36:31
- Hosea 4:9
- Micah 2:7
- Zechariah 1:4
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.
