עֲבֻדָּה
service
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5657 appears in the Book of Genesis — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Genesis
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, עבדה (ʻăbuddâh) means “service.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Genesis (50%), then Job. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 26:14. It clusters with עבד, מעבד and עבד under a shared root. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5657 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Household 1×, Servants 1×
- American Standard Version: Household 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Servants 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: A 1×, And 1×, Retinue 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5657 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5657 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5657 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5657 across 4 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.
- service, household servants
Word origin
Derived from עבד (ʻâbad) (H5647) — to serve.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5657, 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.
Derives from
Shares the same root
- מעבד maʻbâd H4566 work
- עבד ʻăbad H5648 to make
- עבד ʻebed H5650 servant
- עבד ʻăbâd H5652 work
- עבדה ʻăbôdâh H5656 service
- עבדות ʻabdûwth H5659 bondage
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- עבדא ʻAbdâʼ H5653 Abda
- עבד אדום ʻÔbêd ʼĔdôwm H5654 Obed-edom
- עבדאל ʻAbdᵉʼêl H5655 Abdeel
- עבדון ʻAbdôwn H5658 Abdon
- עבדי ʻAbdîy H5660 Abdi
- עבדיה ʻÔbadyâh H5662 Obadiah
- עובד ʻÔwbêd H5744 Obed
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 15 — not the complete family. 7 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
