עֶ֫בֶד מֶ֫לֶךְ
Ebed-melech
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Ebed-melech’ fuller range ↓
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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H5663 appears — 6 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.
Jeremiah 6 verses
- Jeremiah 38:7 עֶֽבֶד מֶ֨לֶךְ n Proper n Proper Now when Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, a eunuch, who was in the king's house, heard that they had put Jeremiah in the dungeon (the king then sitting in the gate of Benjamin),
- Jeremiah 38:8 עֶֽבֶד מֶ֖לֶךְ n Proper n Proper Ebedmelech went forth out of the king's house, and spoke to the king, saying,
- Jeremiah 38:10 עֶֽבֶד מֶ֥לֶךְ n Proper n Proper Then the king commanded Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, Take from hence thirty men with you, and take up Jeremiah the prophet out of the dungeon, before he die.
- Jeremiah 38:11 עֶֽבֶד מֶ֨לֶךְ n Proper n Proper So Ebedmelech took the men with him, and went into the house of the king under the treasury, and took there rags and worn-out garments, and let them down by cords into the dungeon to Jeremiah.
- Jeremiah 38:12 עֶבֶד מֶ֨לֶךְ n Proper n Proper Ebedmelech the Ethiopian said to Jeremiah, Put now these rags and worn-out garments under your armholes under the cords. Jeremiah did so.
- Jeremiah 39:16 לְ/עֶבֶד מֶ֨לֶךְ prep + n Proper n Proper Go, and speak to Ebedmelech the Ethiopian, saying, Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel: Behold, I will bring my words on this city for evil, and not for good; and they shall be accomplished before you in that day.
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.
The Hebrew name עבד מלך centers on the idea of “Ebed-melech.” Jeremiah dominates its distribution — 6 of 6 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 6 verses — uncommon. Its earliest occurrence is Jeremiah 38:7. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5663 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 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: Ebedmelech 5×
- American Standard Version: Ebed-melech 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Ebed-melech 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5663 across 6 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 H5663 across 6 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 H5663 across 6 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.
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- Ebed-melech = "servant of the king"
- an Ethiopian eunuch in the service of king Zedekiah, through whose interference Jeremiah was released from prison
Word origin
עֶ֫בֶד מֶ֫לֶךְ n.pr.m. (= servant of the king );—Eth. official of Zedekiah
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עבד (ʻebed) (H5650) — servant.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms H5663 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מֶ֨לֶךְ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 38:7 | 4 |
| עֶֽבֶד | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 38:7 | 4 |
| לְ/עֶבֶד | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 39:16 | 1 |
| מֶ֖לֶךְ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 38:8 | 1 |
| מֶ֥לֶךְ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 38:10 | 1 |
| עֶבֶד | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 38:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5663, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ebed-melech). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
A servant of the king; probably an official title, an Ethiopian, "one of the eunuchs which was in the king's house;" i.e., in the palace of Zedekiah, king of Judah. He interceded with the king in Jeremiah's behalf, and was the means of saving him from death by famine (Jer. 38:7-13: comp. 39:15-18).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(a king's servant), an Ethiopian eunuch in the service of King Zedekiah, through whose interference Jeremiah was released from prison. (Jeremiah 38:7) ff.; Jere 39:15 ff. (B.C. 1589).
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
the king's servant
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
