סְבַל
to bear load
‘to bear load’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5446 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Ezra 1 verse
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.
“to bear load” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb סבל (çᵉbal). It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Ezra. It occurs only once, in Ezra 6:3. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5446 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezra 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Thereof be strongly laid 1×
- American Standard Version: Thereof be strongly laid 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Be firmly laid 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Be raised 1×, Let 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5446 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5446 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5446 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5446 across 2 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.
- to bear a load
- (Poal) laid (participle)
Word origin
[ סְבַל ] vb. bear, carry a load
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from סבל (çâbal) (H5445) — to bear.
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.
סָבַל
- (b. h.) to carry a load; to sustain; to endure. Lev. R. s. 4, end הנפש הזו סוֹבֶלֶת … והקב"ה סוֹבֵל את עולמו the soul supports the body, and the Lord sustains his world; (Tanḥ. Ḥayé 3 משמרת … משמר). Pes. 113ᵇ ארבעה אין … סוֹבַלְתָּן there are four things which the mind (of man) cannot endure. Gen. R. s. 22 (ref. to Gen. IV, 13) לעליונים … אתה סובל ולפשעי אין אתה סובל thou bearest those on high and those below, and my trespass thou wilt not bear? Y. R. Hash. II, end, 58ᵇ (ref. to Ps. CXLIV, 14 אלופינו מסבלים) בשעה שהגדולים סוֹבְלִין את וכ׳ when the great bear the small (take care of them), there is no breach &c.; ib. בשעה שהקטנים סובלין וכ׳ when the small bear the great (respect their superiority), there is &c.; Yalk. Ps. 888; Ruth R. introd. (ושם). Ex. R. s. 5 סָבְלוּ מכות they endured maltreatment; a. fr.—Y. Peah I, 16ᵇ הפורק … ואיני סוֹבְלָהּ he who throws off the yoke, that is, he who says, there is a law, but I will not bear it. e.g. Genesis 4:13
- to load. Part. pass. מְסוּבָּל. Ber. 17ᵃ (ref. to Ps. l. c.) מְסוּבָּלִים במצות laden with good deeds; מס׳ בייסורים laden with pains. Yalk. Deut. 963 מסובלים כספם וכ׳ (Deut. R. s. 11 היו סובלים) carrying their silver and their gold; a. e.
סְבַל
- Targ. Y. Deut. XXXII, 11. Targ. Job XXI, 3. Targ. Y. II, Deut. XXIV, 15; a. fr.—Cant. R. to V, 14 למִיסְבַּל, v. סִבְנִי. Gen. R. s. 38 דסָבֵיל רוחא, v. רוּחָא; a. e.
- (v. סִבָּלוֹן) to send presents of betrothal. Kidd. 50ᵇ מְסַבְּלֵי והדר מקדשי where it is customary to send the presents before betrothal; a. e.
סַבָּל
- preced.) load-carrier. Y. B. Mets. X, end, 12ᶜ; (Bab. ib. 118ᵇ כַּתָּף). Kidd. 82ᵇ; Y. ib. IV, end, 66ᵈ; Tosef. ib. V, 15 (ed. Zuck. note). Tanḥ., ed. Bub., M’tsora 11 בריאים כסַבָּלוֹ של עולם as strong as he who carries the world; Yalk. Ps. 808.—Pl. סַבָּלִין. Kel. XXVIII, 9 כסת הס׳ the cushion which load-carriers wear on their heads.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5446, 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 → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
