סִבְלָה
burden
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5450 appears — 6 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.
Exodus 6 verses
- Exodus 1:11 בְּ/סִבְלֹתָ֑/ם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 3mp Therefore they set taskmasters over them to afflict them with their burdens. They built storage cities for Pharaoh: Pithom and Raamses.
- Exodus 2:11 בְּ/סִבְלֹתָ֑/ם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 3mp It happened in those days, when Moses had grown up, that he went out to his brothers, and looked at their burdens. He saw an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, one of his brothers.
- Exodus 5:4 לְ/סִבְלֹתֵי/כֶֽם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 2mp The king of Egypt said to them, "Why do you, Moses and Aaron, take the people from their work? Get back to your burdens!"
- Exodus 5:5 מִ/סִּבְלֹתָֽ/ם prep + n c fp cs + sfx pers 3mp Pharaoh said, "Behold, the people of the land are now many, and you make them rest from their burdens."
- Exodus 6:6 סִבְלֹ֣ת n c fp cs Therefore tell the children of Israel, 'I am Yahweh, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments:
- Exodus 6:7 סִבְל֥וֹת n c fp cs and I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God; and you shall know that I am Yahweh your God, who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
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.
סבלה — transliterated çᵉbâlâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “burden.” Its uses cluster heavily in Exodus (100% of all occurrences). Spanning 6 verses in 1 book, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at Exodus 1:11, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H5450 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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
- Exodus 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 6 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: Burdens 3×, You out from under the burdens 2×
- American Standard Version: Burdens 3×, You out from under the burdens 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Labor 2×, Yoke 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Burdens 4×, Burdens of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5450 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5450 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5450 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H5450 across 6 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.
- burden, forced labour, compulsory service, burden bearing
Word origin
n.f. burden;—pl. cstr. סִבְלֹת מִצְרַיִם Ex 6:6 (P), of the heavy labours imposed on Isr. by Egyptian, v 7; sf. סִבְלֹתֵיכֶם 5:4 (J), סִבְלֹתָם 1:11; 5:5 (both J), 2:11 (E); (cf. ψ 81:7, סֵבֶל).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from סבל (çêbel) (H5447) — load.
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.
סִבְלָה
- preced.) load, burden.—Pl. סִבְלוֹת. Lev. R. s. 37 סִבְלוֹתָם, v. יָשַׁב. Ex. R. s. 1 שהיה רואה בסבלותם וכ׳ he saw their burdens and wept. Ib. היה הולך ומישב להן סִבְלוֹתֵיהֶן he went and helped them to arrange their burdens; a. e.
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 5 distinct written forms H5450 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/סִבְלֹתָ֑/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 1:11 | 2 |
| לְ/סִבְלֹתֵי/כֶֽם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 5:4 | 1 |
| מִ/סִּבְלֹתָֽ/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 5:5 | 1 |
| סִבְל֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 6:7 | 1 |
| סִבְלֹ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 6:6 | 1 |
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.
