מְתוּשֶׁ֫לַח
Methuselah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Methuselah’ fuller range ↓
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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H4968 appears in the Book of Genesis — 5 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.
Genesis
- Genesis 5:21 מְתוּשָֽׁלַח n Proper Enoch lived sixty-five years, and became the father of Methuselah.
- Genesis 5:22 מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח n Proper Enoch walked with God after he became the father of Methuselah three hundred years, and became the father of sons and daughters.
- Genesis 5:25 מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח n Proper Methuselah lived one hundred eighty-seven years, and became the father of Lamech.
- Genesis 5:26 מְתוּשֶׁ֗לַח n Proper Methuselah lived after he became the father of Lamech seven hundred eighty-two years, and became the father of sons and daughters.
- Genesis 5:27 מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח n Proper All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty-nine years, then he died.
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, מתושלח (Mᵉthûwshelach) means “Methuselah.” Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (83% of all occurrences). With 6 verses in 2 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 5:21. 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 H4968 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 5 verses 83%
- 1 Chronicles 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 5 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Methuselah 6×
- American Standard Version†: Methuselah 6×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Methuselah 6×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Methuselah 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4968 across 6† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4968 across 6† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4968 across 6† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4968 across 6† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Methuselah = "man of the dart"
- son of Enoch, 6th in descent from Seth, and father of Lamech
Word origin
II. v. sub מַת supr..
I. n.pr.m. descendant of Seth (? man of the dart: more prob. Bab.; see conj. in HomPSBA 1893, 243 ff.);—מ׳ Gn 5:22, 25, 26, 27 (P), 1 Ch 1:3, מְתוּשָׁ֑לַח Gn 5:21 (P). 𝔊 Μαθουσαλα.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מת (math) (H4962) — man.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms H4968 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מְתוּשֶׁ֔לַח | Noun, Proper | Genesis 5:22 | 3 |
| מְתוּשֶׁ֖לַח | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 1:3 | 1 |
| מְתוּשֶׁ֗לַח | Noun, Proper | Genesis 5:26 | 1 |
| מְתוּשָֽׁלַח | Noun, Proper | Genesis 5:21 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4968, 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
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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Methuselah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Man of the dart, the son of Enoch, and grandfather of Noah. He was the oldest man of whom we have any record, dying at the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine years, in the year of the Flood (Gen. 5:21-27; 1 Chr. 1:3).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(man of the dart), the son of Enoch, sixth in descent from Seth, and father of Lamech. (Genesis 5:25-27)
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
