מְשׁוּבָה
apostasy
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 H4878 appears in the Book of Hosea — 2 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.
Hosea
- Hosea 11:7 לִ/מְשֽׁוּבָתִ֑/י prep + n c fs cs + sfx pers 1cs My people are determined to turn from me. Though they call to the Most High, He certainly won't exalt them.
- Hosea 14:4 מְשׁ֣וּבָתָ֔/ם n c fs cs + sfx pers 3mp "I will heal their waywardness. I will love them freely; For my anger is turned away from him.
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, משובה (mᵉshûwbâh) means “apostasy.” The word gravitates to Jeremiah (75%), then Hosea and Proverbs. It appears 12 verses across 3 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. First canonically at Proverbs 1:32, it enters the text early. It shares a root with שוב, שובב and שובב. Dig into 12-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4878 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 12 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 12 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 11 verses · 92%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 8%
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: Backsliding 5×, Backslidings 2×
- American Standard Version: Backsliding 5×, Backslidings 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Faithless 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Apostate 4×, Apostasies 3×, Apostasy 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4878 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H4878 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H4878 across 12 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4878 across 12 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.
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.
- turning away, turning back, apostasy, backsliding
Word origin
[ מְשׁוּבָה ], מְשֻׁבָה n.f. turning back, apostasy
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שוב (shûwb) (H7725) — to return.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms H4878 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מְשֻׁבָ֣ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 3:6 | 4 |
| וּ/מְשֻֽׁבוֹתַ֨יִ/ךְ֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 2:19 | 1 |
| לִ/מְשֽׁוּבָתִ֑/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Hosea 11:7 | 1 |
| מְשׁ֣וּבָתָ֔/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Hosea 14:4 | 1 |
| מְשֻׁבָ֤ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 3:12 | 1 |
| מְשׁוּבַ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 1:32 | 1 |
| מְשׁוּבֹֽתֵי/כֶ֑ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 3:22 | 1 |
| מְשׁוּבֹתֵ֖י/נוּ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 14:7 | 1 |
| מְשׁוּבוֹתֵי/הֶֽם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 5:6 | 1 |
| משבותי/הם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 5:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4878, 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
- שובב shôwbâb H7726 backsliding
- שובב shôwbêb H7728 backsliding
- שובה shûwbâh H7729 withdrawal
- שיבה shîybâh H7870 restoration
- תוב tûwb H8421 to return
- תשובה tᵉshûwbâh H8666 answer
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- יושב חסד Yûwshab Cheçed H3142 Jushab-hesed
- ישבי לחם Yâshubîy Lechem H3433 Jashubi-lehem
- ישבעם Yâshobʻâm H3434 Jashobeam
- ישוב Yâshûwb H3437 Jashub
- משובב Mᵉshôwbâb H4877 Meshobab
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. 5 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 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 12 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.
