מַשְׂכִּיל
song
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4905 appears — 11 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 11 verses
- Psalms 32:1 מַ֫שְׂכִּ֥יל n c ms Blessed is he whose disobedience is forgiven, Whose sin is covered.
- Psalms 42:1 מַשְׂכִּ֥יל n c ms As the deer pants for the water brooks, So my soul pants after you, God.
- Psalms 44:1 מַשְׂכִּֽיל n c ms We have heard with our ears, God; Our fathers have told us, What work you did in their days, In the days of old.
- Psalms 45:1 מַ֝שְׂכִּ֗יל n c ms My heart overflows with a noble theme. I recite my verses for the king. My tongue is like the pen of a skillful writer.
- Psalms 53:1 מַשְׂכִּ֥יל n c ms The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, and have done abominable iniquity. There is no one who does good.
- Psalms 55:1 מַשְׂכִּ֥יל n c ms Listen to my prayer, God. Don't hide yourself from my supplication.
- Psalms 74:1 מַשְׂכִּ֗יל n c ms God, why have you rejected us forever? Why does your anger smolder against the sheep of your pasture?
- Psalms 78:1 מַשְׂכִּ֗יל n c ms Hear my law, my people. Turn your ears to the words of my mouth.
- Psalms 88:1 מַ֝שְׂכִּ֗יל n c ms Yahweh, the God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before you.
- Psalms 89:1 מַ֝שְׂכִּ֗יל n c ms I will sing of the loving kindness of Yahweh forever. With my mouth, I will make known your faithfulness to all generations.
- Psalms 142:1 מַשְׂכִּ֥יל n c ms I cry with my voice to Yahweh. With my voice, I ask Yahweh for mercy.
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.
“song” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun משכיל (maskîyl). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Psalms. It appears 11 verses across 1 book of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Scripture first uses it in Psalms 32:1. Older and newer Bibles part ways — “maschil” in the King James Version, “maskil” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4905 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 →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 11 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 11 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 11 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 11 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: Maschil 13×
- Berean Standard Bible: Maskil 13×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Maskil 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4905 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4905 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4905 across 3 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.
- (Hiphil) poem, song or poem of contemplation
Word origin
n.m. contemplative poem (Hiph. 2. De al.);—in titles of ψψ 32, 42, 44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 74, 78, 88, 89, 142; also 47:8 זַמְּרוּ מ׳: > Ges al. didactic poem (√ 4); Ew Ri Pe al. skilful, artistic song (√ 3); √ 2 alone fits all cases.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שכל (sâkal) (H7919) — to be prudent.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H4905 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מַשְׂכִּ֥יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 42:1 | 4 |
| מַ֝שְׂכִּ֗יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 45:1 | 3 |
| מַשְׂכִּ֗יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 74:1 | 2 |
| מַ֫שְׂכִּ֥יל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 32:1 | 1 |
| מַשְׂכִּֽיל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 44:1 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4905, 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 11 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 11 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.
