סוֹא
So
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘So’ 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 H5471 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.
2 Kings 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.
“So” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name סוא (Çôwʼ). It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in 2 Kings, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Found nowhere else but 2 Kings 17:4. See 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5471 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
- 2 Kings 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: So 1×
- American Standard Version: So 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: So 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: So 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5471 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5471 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5471 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5471 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- So = "concealed"
- a king of Egypt (perhaps only the vizier of the king)
Word origin
n.pr.m. (𝔊 Σηγωρ, A Σωα, 𝔊L Αδραμελεχ τὸν Αἰθίοπα τὸν κατοικοῦντα ἐν Αἰγύπτῳ (!); JosAnt. ix, 14, 1 Σωαν; 𝔙 Sua; all acc.), called מֶלֶךְ מִצְרַיִם 2 K 17:4, with whom Hoshea had intrigue; poss. = Šab-ʾ-ê, or Sib-ʾ-ê mentioned by Sargon (KB ii. 54, 1. 25, 26 COTad loc.) as a ruler (appar.) under Pirʾu of Muṣuri; hence SchrCOT l.c. proposes to read סֶוֶא, and, further identif. Šab-ʾ-ê = סֶוֶא with Šabaku, founder of 25th (Ethiop.) dynasty, cf. WiedÄg. Gesch. 583 f.; very uncertain is Wkl’s conj. of סוא = Sib-ʾ-ê as gneral of kg. Pirʾu of Muṣri in N Arabic (WklMVG 1898, 3 ff.).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign derivation
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.
סוֹא
- , v. סוֹי
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.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (So). 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
(Nubian, Sabako), an Ethiopian king who brought Egypt under his sway. He was bribed by Hoshea to help him against the Assyrian monarch Shalmaneser (2 Kings 17:4). This was a return to the policy that had been successful in the reign of Jeroboam I.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
"So, king of Egypt," is once mentioned in the Bible-- (2 Kings 17:4) So has been identified by different writers with the first and second kings of the Ethiopian twenty-fifth dynasty, called by Manetho, Sabakon (Shebek) and Sebichos (Shebetek).
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
a measure for grain; vail
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
