מַרְבִּית
multitude
also: increase, great number, greatness fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 4 times (80%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4768 appears — 5 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.
Leviticus 1 verse
1 Samuel 1 verse
1 Chronicles 1 verse
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 9:6 מַרְבִּ֣ית n c fs cs However I didn't believe their words, until I came, and my eyes had seen it; and, behold, the half of the greatness of your wisdom was not told me: you exceed the fame that I heard.
- 2 Chronicles 30:18 מַרְבִּ֣ית n c fs cs For a multitude of the people, even many of Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet did they eat the Passover otherwise than it is written. For Hezekiah had prayed for them, saying, The good Yahweh pardon everyone
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.
The Hebrew noun מרבית centers on the idea of “multitude.” With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. 2 Chronicles dominates its distribution — 2 of 5 verses. Debuting at Leviticus 25:37, it then recurs through the corpus. Alongside “multitude” the lexicon also lists “increase”, “great number”, and “greatness” — part of its full sense range. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4768 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 40%
- Leviticus 1 verse 20%
- 1 Samuel 1 verse 20%
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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 60%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 20%
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: All the increase 1×, Greatness 1×, Hitherto the greatest 1×
- American Standard Version: All the increase 1×, Behold the half of the greatness 1×, Hitherto the greatest 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Descendants 1×, Greatness 1×, Large number 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Greatness of 1×, Increase of 1×, Majority of them 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4768 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4768 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4768 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4768 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 5 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. increase, concr.:
- a. of family 1 S 2:33. e.g. 1 Samuel 2:33
- b. increment, interest, usury, Lv 25:37 (H; of food-stuffs, ‖ נֶשֶׁךְ, of money; מ׳ of money Egyptian Aramaic, opp. ראש principal, Cooke North-Sem. Inscr. 404). e.g. Leviticus 25:37
- 2. great number: of people 2 Ch 30:18; c. sf. = the greater part of them, 1 Ch 12:30 (v. supr.). e.g. 2 Chronicles 30:18
- 3. greatness, of wisdom 2 Ch 9:6. e.g. 2 Chronicles 9:6
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.f. increase, great number, greatness;—מ׳ abs. Lv 25:37; cstr. 1 S 2:33 + 2 times; sf. מַרְבִּיתָם 1 Ch 12:30 (van d. H. v 29);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רבה (râbâh) (H7235) — to multiply.
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.
מַרְבִּית
- 1. increase, profit. B. Mets. 61ᵃ
- 2. young tree.—Pl. מַרְבִּיּוֹת, v. מוּרְבִּית I.
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 4 distinct written forms H4768 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מַרְבִּ֣ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Chronicles 9:6 | 2 |
| וּ/בְ/מַרְבִּ֖ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 25:37 | 1 |
| מַרְבִּ֥ית | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Samuel 2:33 | 1 |
| מַרְבִּיתָ֔/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 1 Chronicles 12:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4768, 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
- ארבה ʼarbeh H697 locust
- מרבה marbeh H4766 abundance
- מרבה mirbâh H4767 much
- רבה rᵉbâh H7236 to grow great
- רבו rᵉbûw H7238 greatness
- תרבות tarbûwth H8635 offspring
- תרבית tarbîyth H8636 interest
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 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.
