סֵ֫פֶל
bowl
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
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, Construct 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5602 appears — 2 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.
Judges 2 verses
- Judges 5:25 בְּ/סֵ֥פֶל prep + n c ms cs He asked water, [and] she gave him milk; She brought him butter in a lordly dish.
- Judges 6:38 הַ/סֵּ֖פֶל ptcl def.art + n c ms It was so; for he rose up early on the next day, and pressed the fleece together, and wrung the dew out of the fleece, a bowl full of water.
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.
ספל — transliterated çêphel — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “bowl.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Judges. Debuting at Judges 5:25, 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 H5602 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Judges 2 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 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: Bowl 1×, Dish 1×
- American Standard Version: Bowlful 1×, Dish 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bowl 1×, Bowlful 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bowl 1×, Bowl of 1×, Of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5602 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5602 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5602 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5602 across 3 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.
- bowl, basin
Word origin
Origin: from an unused root meaning to depress
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.
סֵפֶל
- (ספל to scrape, cut out)
- 1. (b. h.; bowl, basin. Kidd. 31ᵃ הטל להן מים בס׳ וכ׳ pour water into a bowl for them (to drink from) &c., v. קִעְקֵעַ I. Nidd. 27ᵃ; Y. ib. III, 51ᵃ במוציא את הס׳ וכ׳ when he carries away the basin (with the after-birth) &c. Cant. R. to I, 1; Koh. R. to I, 1 (ref. to יקה, Prov. XXX, 1) כס׳ הזה שנתמלא בשעתו וכ׳ like a bowl which is filled in due time and emptied in due time, so did &c.; Num. R. s. 10; a. e.—Pl. סְפָלִים, סְפָלִין. Sabb. 129ᵇ the rich keep the after-birth בס׳ של שמן in basins filled with oil; Tosef. ib. XV (XVI), 3 בסופלי (corr. acc.). Ber. 44ᵃ סִפְלֵי טרית basinfuls of salted fish. Zeb. 91ᵇ לס׳ for the bowls (for libations); a. e. e.g. Proverbs 30:1
- 2. a frame stool or bench; also night-stool, interch. with סַפְסָל. Midr. Till. to Ps. LXXVIII, 45 היה … יושב על הס׳ וכ׳ (ed. Bub. ספסל) the Philistine (to save himself from the attack of the mice) seated himself on a stool of bronze; והיה הס׳ נבקע וכ׳ and the stool burst of itself, and the mouse came up &c.; Midr. Sam. ch. X; Yalk. Sam. 102; Yalk. Kings 222 ספסל; Yalk. Ex. 183 ספסל; a. e.—Pl. as ab. Tosef. Ab. Zar. VI (VII), 3 הס׳ והקתידראות ed. Zuck. (Var. הסַפְסָלִין) stools and chairs. Midr. Sam. l. c.; Yalk. Sam. l. c.; 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 2 distinct written forms H5602 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/סֵ֥פֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Judges 5:25 | 1 |
| הַ/סֵּ֖פֶל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Judges 6:38 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
