עַבְדוּת
bondage
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5659 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Ezra 2 verses
- Ezra 9:8 בְּ/עַבְדֻתֵֽ/נוּ prep + n c fs cs + sfx pers 1cp Now for a little moment grace has been shown from Yahweh our God, to leave us a remnant to escape, and to give us a nail in his holy place, that our God may lighten our eyes, and give us a little reviving in our bondage.
- Ezra 9:9 וּ/בְ/עַבְדֻ֔תֵ/נוּ conj + prep + n c fs cs + sfx pers 1cp For we are bondservants; yet our God has not forsaken us in our bondage, but has extended loving kindness to us in the sight of the kings of Persia, to give us a reviving, to set up the house of our God, and to repair the ruins of it, and to give us a wall in Judah and in Jerusalem.
Nehemiah 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.
At its core, עבדות (ʻabdûwth) means “bondage.” With only 3 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Ezra (67% of all occurrences). First canonically at Ezra 9:8, it enters the text early. From the same root come עבד, מעבד and עבד. 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 H5659 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 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: Bondage 3×
- American Standard Version: Bondage 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bondage 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Slavery 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5659 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5659 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5659 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5659 across 4 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.
- servitude, bondage
Word origin
[ עַבְדוּת ] n.f. servitude, bondage;—sf. Ezr 9:8, 9; Ne 9:17
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עבד (ʻâbad) (H5647) — to serve.
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.
עַבְדּוּת
- (preced. wds.) slavery, servitude; status of a slave. Y. Kidd. I, 59ᵈ אחת בסוף שש עד שהוא בעַבְדּוּתוֹ (not בעבודתו) one declaration at the end of the sixth year, while he is still a slave by law. Pes. X, 5 (in the Passover night service) הוציאנו מע׳ לחרות he led us forth from slavery to freedom; Kidd. 22ᵇ. Hor. 10ᵃ כמדומין אתם ששררה … ע׳ וכ׳ you seem to believe that I place a rulership upon you (by appointing you to office), I place servitude upon you (ref. to I Kings XII, 7); a. fr. e.g. 1 Kings 12:7
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 3 distinct written forms H5659 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/עַבְדֻתֵֽ/נוּ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezra 9:8 | 1 |
| וּ/בְ/עַבְדֻ֔תֵ/נוּ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezra 9:9 | 1 |
| לְ/עַבְדֻתָ֖/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Nehemiah 9:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5659, 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
- עבדה ʻăbuddâh H5657 service
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 3 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.
