מַקְהֵל
assembly
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Both
- Attested as both masculine and feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4721 appears — 2 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.
Psalms 2 verses
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.
“assembly” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מקהל (maqhêl). A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Psalms. First canonically at Psalms 26:12, it enters the text early. Related forms include קהל, קהל and קהלה. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4721 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Congregations 2×
- American Standard Version: Congregations 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Congregations 1×, Great congregation 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Among the assemblies 1×, Assemblies 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4721 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4721 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4721 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4721 across 2 tagged occurrences — 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.
- assembly, choir
Word origin
[ מַקְהֵל ] n.[m.] assembly, for worship, pl.: poss. choirs
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קהל (qâhal) (H6950) — to assemble.
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.
קָהַל
- to call.
- to assemble. Ber. 61ᵇ; Ab. Zar. 18ᵃ מַקְהִיל קהילות ברבים called public assemblies (to teach). Gen. R. s. 99 כשיַקְהִיל קרח וכ׳ (some ed. כשיַקְהֵל) when Korah will gather his followers for strife, my (Jacob’s) name shall not be joined with them. Yalk. Ex. 408 כדי שילמדו … להַקְהִיל וכ׳ that coming generations may learn from thee to assemble congregations every Sabbath; a. e.
- to be assembled. Gen. R. s. 98 בשעה שהן נִקְהָלִין על וכ׳ when they will be assembled against Moses in the party of Korah &c. Lev. R. s. 24 פרשה … בהִקָּהֵל וכ׳ this section (Lev. XIX) was proclaimed in full assembly (v. ib. 2), because &c. Koh. R. to I, 1, v. קֹהֶלֶת.
- same. Gen. R. s. 99 (ref. to יקהת, Gen. XLIX, 10) מי … מִתְקָהֲלִין עליו he around whom the nations will group themselves.—[Num. R. s. 12 מתקהלא, v. קָהָה.] e.g. Genesis 49:10
קָהָל
- preced.) gathering, congregation. Y. Hor. I, 46ᵃ bot. (ref. to Num. XV, 24, העדה) כל השבטים קרויין ק׳ all tribes together are called ḳahal; כל שבט … ק׳ every tribe for itself is called ḳ.; Bab. Hor. 3ᵃ כגון … רובו של ק׳ וכ׳ when six tribes have sinned, and they form the majority of the congregation (the entire people) &c. Ib. הני הוא דאיקרו ק׳ only they (the entire people) are called ḳ.—Kidd. 73ᵃ קְהַל ודאי a community of Israelites of undoubted legitimacy; קְ׳ ספק of doubtful legitimacy; Y. Yeb. VIII, 9ᵇ bot. קָ׳ ברור; קְ׳ ספק. Ib. [read:] ארבע קְהִילּוֹת אינון קְ׳ יי׳ קְ׳ כהנים וכ׳ four communities are meant by ‘the congregation of the Lord’ (Deut. XXIII, 2; 3; 4; 9): the community of priests, of Levites, of Israelites, and of proselytes. Mish. ib. VIII, 2 ואינן … אלא מלבא בק׳ and they are forbidden only to enter the congregation (to intermarry with Israelites); a. fr.—Pl., v. קְהִלָּה e.g. Numbers 15:24
קָהָל ²
- Targ. Num. XVI, 3. Ib. XX, 4; a. fr.—Kidd. 73ᵃ מחד קהל נפקו ed. (Rashi קהלא) the (laws concerning priests and Levites) are derived from one of the verses (Deut. XXIII, 3; 4; 9) in which ḳahal occurs.—Pl. קַהֲלֵי. Ib. הנהו נמי תרי ק׳ נינהו these (priests and Levites) are also two communities (requiring two verses with the word ḳahal in them); a. e. e.g. Deuteronomy 23:3
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 2 distinct written forms H4721 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ֝/מַקְהֵלִ֗ים | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 26:12 | 1 |
| בְּֽ֭/מַקְהֵלוֹת | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 68:26 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4721, 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
- קהל qâhâl H6951 assembly
- קהלה qᵉhillâh H6952 congregation
- קהלת qôheleth H6953 preacher
- קלה qâlahh H7035 to assemble
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. 2 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 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
