מֶרְכָּבָה
chariot
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4818 appears in the Book of 1 Chronicles — 1 distinct verse. 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
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.
מרכבה — transliterated merkâbâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “chariot.” It first appears in Genesis 41:43. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 41 verses — moderately common. 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 H4818 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.
- 19 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 19 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #819
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 819 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 41 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 6 verses 15%
- 1 Kings 5 verses 12%
- 2 Kings 5 verses 12%
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) 29 verses · 71%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 8 verses · 20%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 10%
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: Chariot 21×, Chariots 19×
- American Standard Version: Chariot 22×, Chariots 15×
- Berean Standard Bible: Chariot 21×, Chariots 17×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chariot 26×, Chariots 12×, The 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4818 across 44 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H4818 across 44 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4818 across 41 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 3 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4818 across 51 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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.
- chariot
Word origin
n.f. chariot;—abs. מ׳ Ju 4:15 +, cstr. מִרְכֶּ֫בֶת †Gn 41:43; sf. מֶרְכַּבְתּוֹ 46:29 +; pl. מַרְכָּבוֹת Zc 6:1 +; cstr. מַרְכְּבוֹת 2 K 23:11 +, -בֹת Ex 15:4; sf. מַרְכְּבֹתֶיךָ Mi 5:10; Hb 3:8, etc.;—chariot (often ‖ סוּס(ים), 1 S 8:11 פָרָשִׁים): especially war-chariot, Egypt., Ex 14:25 (J), 15:4 (song), 2 Ch 14:8; from Muṣri in N. Syriac (according to Wkl., v. מצרים ad fin., cf. Kit 1 K 10:28 Benz1b.) 1 K 10:29 = 2 Ch 1:17; Can., Jos 11:6, 9 (JE), Ju 4:15 (‖ רֶכֶב), 5:28 (‖ id.); Assyrian, Is 2:7; Na 3:2; foe from north Je 4:13, nations in gen. Hg 2:22; Isr. and Jud. 1 K 20:33; 22:35 = 2 Ch 18:34; 2 K 9:27; 10:15; 2 Ch 35:24; Mi 5:10; fig. of י׳’s chariots Is 66:15; Hb 3:8, cf. (in vision) Zc 6:1, 2(×2), 3(×2); מ׳ for dignity and display Gn 41:43 (E), 46:29 (J), 1 S 8:11(×2); 2 S 15:1; 2 K 5:21, 26, מַרְכְּבוֹת כְּבוֹדֶ֑ךָ Is 22:18 (iron.); used in flight 1 K 12:18 = 2 Ch 10:18, Mi 1:13; מַרְכְּבוֹת הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ 2 K 23:11 (idolatrous); הַמּ׳ הַכְּרוּבִים (read מִרְכֶּבֶת הַכּ׳, 𝔊 Benz) 1 Ch 28:18 (on this conception of cherubim in temple v. Benz); מ׳ in similes: כְּמַעֲשֵׂה אוֹפַן הַמּ׳ 1 K 7:33, כְּקוֹל מ׳ Jo 2:5; obscure מַר׳ עַמִּי נָדִיב Ct 6:12 chariots of my people, a prince (?)—בֵּית מַרְכָּבוֹת v. p. 112.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מרכב (merkâb) (H4817) — chariot.
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.
מֶרְכָּבָה
- preced.) chariot. Esth. R. to I, 2 (ref. to II Chr. IX, 17) [read:] שהיה עשוי כמֶרְכַּבְתּוֹ של מי וכ׳ it was made like the chariot of him who spoke and the world existed. Num. R. s. 12 אגרת … ומֶרְכַּבְתָּהּ Igrath … and her chariot; a. e.—Esp. the divine chariot of the vision of Ezekiel (Ez. I); מעשה מ׳, or מ׳ the mystic speculations on the divine chariot, esoterics. Gen. R. s. 82 האבות הן הן המ׳ the patriarchs are the divine chariot. Ḥag. II, 1. Ib. 13ᵃ אגמרך במעשה המ׳ I shall instruct thee in the secret of the vision of Ezekiel. Ib. עד היכן מעשה המ׳ up to which verse (in Ez. I) do the speculations on ‘the Chariot’ go (the communication of which is subject to certain restrictions)?—Tosef. Meg. IV (III), 28. Cant. R. to I, 4 (ref. to חדריו ib.) מנין … ויגלה להם חדרי מ׳ how should Ezekiel be able to reveal to them the inwardness of the Chariot? Ib. 10 שמא בחדרי מ׳ וכ׳ hast thou perhaps been studying the secrets of the Chariot?; Lev. R. s. 16 בסדרי מ׳ (corr. acc.); a. fr.—Pl. מֶרְכָּבוֹת. Pesik. Baḥod., p. 107ᵇ; Pesik. R. s. 21; a. fr. e.g. 2 Chronicles 9:17
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 36 distinct written forms H4818 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.
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
- Genesis 41:43
- Exodus 14:25
- Joshua 11:6
- Judges 4:15
- 1 Samuel 8:11
- 2 Samuel 15:1
- 1 Kings 10:29
- 2 Kings 5:21
- 1 Chronicles 28:18
- 2 Chronicles 1:17
- Song of Solomon 6:12
- Isaiah 2:7
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.
