סֶ֫מֶל
idol
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).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5566 appears in the Book of Ezekiel — 2 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.
Ezekiel
- 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.
