מְצִלְתַּיִם
cymbals
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.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Dual
- Exactly two — for natural pairs and some measures of time.
Every verse where H4700 appears — 13 distinct verses across 4 books. 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 Chronicles 8 verses
- 1 Chronicles 13:8 וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתַּ֖יִם conj + prep + n c fd David and all Israel played before God with all their might, even with songs, and with harps, and with psalteries, and with tambourines, and with cymbals, and with trumpets.
- 1 Chronicles 15:16 וּ/מְצִלְתָּ֑יִם conj + n c fd David spoke to the chief of the Levites to appoint their brothers the singers, with instruments of music, psalteries and harps and cymbals, sounding aloud and lifting up the voice with joy.
- 1 Chronicles 15:19 בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֥יִם prep + n c fd So the singers, Heman, Asaph, and Ethan, [were appointed] with cymbals of brass to sound aloud;
- 1 Chronicles 15:28 וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתָּ֑יִם conj + prep + n c fd Thus all Israel brought up the ark of the covenant of Yahweh with shouting, and with sound of the cornet, and with trumpets, and with cymbals, sounding aloud with psalteries and harps.
- 1 Chronicles 16:5 בַּֽ/מְצִלְתַּ֥יִם prep det + n c fd Asaph the chief, and second to him Zechariah, Jeiel, and Shemiramoth, and Jehiel, and Mattithiah, and Eliab, and Benaiah, and Obed-edom, and Jeiel, with psalteries and with harps; and Asaph with cymbals, sounding aloud;
- 1 Chronicles 16:42 וּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ conj + n c fd and with them Heman and Jeduthun [with] trumpets and cymbals for those that should sound aloud, and [with] instruments for the songs of God; and the sons of Jeduthun to be at the gate.
- 1 Chronicles 25:1 וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתָּ֑יִם conj + prep + n c fd Moreover, David and the captains of the host set apart for the service certain of the sons of Asaph, and of Heman, and of Jeduthun, who should prophesy with harps, with psalteries, and with cymbals: and the number of those who did the work according to their service was:
- 1 Chronicles 25:6 בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ prep + n c fd All these were under the hands of their father for song in the house of Yahweh, with cymbals, psalteries, and harps, for the service of the house of God; Asaph, Jeduthun, and Heman being under the order of the king.
2 Chronicles 3 verses
- 2 Chronicles 5:12 בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ prep + n c fd also the Levites who were the singers, all of them, even Asaph, Heman, Jeduthun, and their sons and their brothers, arrayed in fine linen, with cymbals and psalteries and harps, stood at the east end of the altar, and with them one hundred twenty priests sounding with trumpets;)
- 2 Chronicles 5:13 וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתַּ֜יִם conj + prep + n c fd it happened, when the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking Yahweh; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of music, and praised Yahweh, [saying], For he is good; for his loving kindness endures forever; that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of Yahweh,
- 2 Chronicles 29:25 בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ prep + n c fd He set the Levites in the house of Yahweh with cymbals, with psalteries, and with harps, according to the commandment of David, and of Gad the king's seer, and Nathan the prophet; for the commandment was of Yahweh by his prophets.
Ezra 1 verse
Nehemiah 1 verse
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, מצלת (mᵉtsêleth) means “cymbals.” Its uses cluster heavily in 1 Chronicles (62% of all occurrences). With 13 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at 1 Chronicles 13:8, it enters the text early. From the same root come צלל, מצלה and צלצל. Dig into 13-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4700 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Chronicles 8 verses 62%
- 2 Chronicles 3 verses 23%
- Ezra 1 verse 8%
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 13 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 13 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: Cymbals 12×
- American Standard Version: Cymbals 12×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cymbals 11×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Cymbals 13×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4700 across 13 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4700 across 13 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4700 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear 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 H4700 across 14 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.
- cymbals
Word origin
n.f.du. cymbals (appar. later equiv. of צֶלְצְלִים where v. reff.);—מ׳ 1 Ch 13:8 (‖ 2 S 6:5 v. צֶלְצְלִים), 15:19; 16:5, 42; 25:6; 2 Ch 5:12, 13; 29:25; Ezr 3:10; Ne 12:27; -תָּ֑יִם 1 Ch 15:16, 28; 25:1.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צלל (tsâlal) (H6750) — to tingle.
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.
מִצְלַת
- , v. מְצִילְתָּא
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 10 distinct written forms H4700 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 25:6 | 3 |
| וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתָּ֑יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 15:28 | 2 |
| בִּ/מְצִלְתַּ֥יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 15:19 | 1 |
| בַּֽ/מְצִלְתַּ֔יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | Ezra 3:10 | 1 |
| בַּֽ/מְצִלְתַּ֥יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 16:5 | 1 |
| וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתַּ֖יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 13:8 | 1 |
| וּ/בִ/מְצִלְתַּ֜יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 5:13 | 1 |
| וּ/מְצִלְתַּ֨יִם֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 16:42 | 1 |
| וּ/מְצִלְתָּ֑יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 15:16 | 1 |
| מְצִלְתַּ֖יִם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Dual, Absolute | Nehemiah 12:27 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4700, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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.
