סֶ֫מֶל
idol
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (60%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (40%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5566 appears — 5 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 33:7 הַ/סֶּ֖מֶל ptcl def.art + n c ms He set the engraved image of the idol, which he had made, in the house of God, of which God said to David and to Solomon his son, In this house, and in Jerusalem, which I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel, will I put my name forever:
- 2 Chronicles 33:15 הַ/סֶּ֨מֶל֙ ptcl def.art + n c ms He took away the foreign gods, and the idol out of the house of Yahweh, and all the altars that he had built in the mountain of the house of Yahweh, and in Jerusalem, and cast them out of the city.
Ezekiel 2 verses
- Ezekiel 8:3 סֵ֖מֶל n c ms cs He put forth the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of my head; and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and the sky, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the gate of the inner [court] that looks toward the north; where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy.
- Ezekiel 8:5 סֵ֛מֶל n c ms cs Then said he to me, Son of man, lift up your eyes now the way toward the north. So I lifted up my eyes the way toward the north, and see, northward of the gate of the altar this image of jealousy in the entry.
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, סמל (çemel) means “idol.” A scarce word — 5 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in 2 Chronicles (40% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Deuteronomy 4:16. From the same root come שמלה. Dig into 5-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5566 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 40%
- Ezekiel 2 verses 40%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 40%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 20%
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: Idol 2×, Image 2×
- American Standard Version: Idol 2×, Image 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Idol 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Idol 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5566 across 5 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 H5566 across 5 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 H5566 across 5 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 H5566 across 5 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.
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.
- image, statue, idol
Word origin
n.m. Ez 8, 5 perhaps orig. n.pr.div., then gen. image, statue (Ph. סמל id., f. סמלת, Lzb 151, 329, also פנסמלת Id 329; BauRel. i. 88 understands ס׳ to be design. of foreign god);—abs. הַסּ׳ 2 Ch 33:7, 15, סָ֑מֶל Dt 4:16; cstr. סֵ֫מֶל Ez 8:3, 5;—image, figure of anything, פֶּסֶלּ תְּמוּנַת כָּל־ס׳ Dt 4:16; idol-image פֶּסֶל הַסּ׳ 2 Ch 33:7 and (פֶּסֶל om.) v 15; סֵמֶל הַקִּנְאָת Ez 8:3 the statue of jealousy, i.e. that rouses י׳’s jealousy, = v 5.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to resemble
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.
סֶמֶל
- [carving,] carved image. Gen. R. s. 68 (ref. to סלם, Gen. XXVIII, 12) זה צלמו … הוא סלם הוא ס׳ וכ׳ that means the image of Nebuchadnezzar, sullam is semel, the letters being the same. e.g. Genesis 28:12
סָמָל
- ) m. (v. preced.; cmp. γλύφανον, γλυφεῖον) cutting tool.—Pl. סְמָלִים, (or סַמָּ׳). Y. Ab. Zar. III, 42ᶜ bot. [read:] הסל והסולים והס׳ וכ׳ figures on a signet ring with emblems representing a basket, palm-pricks or shears are indications of common (commercial) use (opp. ornaments with idolatrous emblems), v. בִּזָּיּוֹן.
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 H5566 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/סֶּ֖מֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 33:7 | 1 |
| הַ/סֶּ֨מֶל֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 33:15 | 1 |
| סֵ֖מֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 8:3 | 1 |
| סֵ֛מֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 8:5 | 1 |
| סָ֑מֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 4:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5566, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
