עוֹלֵל
child
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H5768 appears in the Book of Joel — 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.
Joel
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.
“child” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun עולל (ʻôwlêl). Scripture first uses it in 1 Samuel 15:3. With 20 verses in 11 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Lamentations, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. From the same root come עול and עול. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5768 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 →
- 20
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 20 distinct verses.
- 11 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 11 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,513
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,513 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 20 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Lamentations 5 verses 25%
- Psalms 3 verses 15%
- Jeremiah 3 verses 15%
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 20 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 11 verses · 55%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 9 verses · 45%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Children 10×, Young children 3×
- American Standard Version†: Young children 6×, Children 4×, Infant 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Children 11×, Infants 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Children 9×, Infants 5×, Child 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5768 across 20† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5768 across 20† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5768 across 20† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H5768 across 19† 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.
- child, boy
Word origin
n.m. La 2:19 child;—abs. עוֹלֵל 1 S 15:3 +, עוֹלָל Je 6:11; 9:20; usually pl. עוֹלְלִים ψ 8:3, עֹלְלִים Jb 3:16, עוֹלָלִים La 4:4 Jo 2:16; cstr. עֹלְלֵי La 2:20; sf. עֹלָלַיִךְ ψ 137:9, עֹלָלֶיהָ Mi 2:9 +, עֹלְלֵיהֶם 2 K 8:2 +, etc.;—child Mi 2:9 La 2:19, 20; 4:4; + יוֹנֵק (sometimes disting. from men and women), 1 S 15:3; 22:19 ψ 8:3 Je 44:7 La 2:11 Jo 2:16, ‖ בַּחוּרִים Je 6:11; 9:20; ‖ בָּנִים ψ 17:14 (heirs of father); dashed in pieces (רטשׁ) by for 2 K 8:12; Ho 14:1; Na 3:10; Is 13:16, cf. ψ 137:9 (נִפֵּץ); taken captive La 1:5; stillborn Jb 3:16.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עול (ʻûwl) (H5763) — to nurse.
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.
עוֹלָל
- nursling, child. Sot. 30ᵇ ע׳ מוטל וכ׳ an infant lying on its mother’s knees; ע׳ הגביה וכ׳ the infant raised its neck, the suckling dropped the breast …, and they said, This is my God &c.; Y. ib. V, 20ᶜ top; a. e.—Pl. עוֹלְלִים. Mekh. B’shall., Shir., s. 1 (ref. to Ps. VIII, 3) ע׳ אלו ע׳ שבחוץ ‘ol’lim means the children playing in the street (with ref. to Jer. IX, 20); Midr. Till. to Ps. l. c. ע׳ אלו שבחוץ ‘ol’lim means infants outside (of the womb, by ref. to Lam. IV, 4); (oth. opin.) ע׳ אלו שבפנים ‘ol’lim refers to those yet unborn (by ref. to Job III, 16); Mekh. l. c.; Yalk. Ps. 640 ע׳ אלו שבמעי אמן; ib. ע׳ חזרו לטיבורן the infants returned to their navel (womb); Yalk. Lam. 1043. Midr. Till. to Ps. IX (ref. העלם, Koh. III, 11) גם אהבת הע׳ נתן וכ׳ even the love of the little ones has he put into the heart of their parents. Midr. Till. to Ps. CXXI אני מנפץ את עוֹלָלַיִךְ … את עוֹלָלַי I myself will shatter thy babes, as thou didst mine; a. e.—Fem. עוֹלְלָה girl. Esth. R. to I, 9 (ref. to לעולליהם, Ps. XVII, 14) ע׳ אחת וכ׳ (some ed. עוּלָה) one babe was left &c.; (Yalk. Ps. 671 יתומה). e.g. Psalms 8:3
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 19 distinct written forms H5768 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5768, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 18 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 20 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
- 1 Samuel 15:3
- 2 Kings 8:12
- Job 3:16
- Psalms 8:2
- Isaiah 13:16
- Jeremiah 6:11
- Lamentations 1:5
- Joel 2:16
- Micah 2:9
- Nahum 3:10
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.
