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עַכָּבִישׁ

spider

‘spider’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H5908 Strong's Hebrew
ʻakkâbîysh Transliteration
/ak-kaw-beesh'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

Compare with another word →

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 noun עכביש centers on the idea of “spider.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Job (50%), then Isaiah. First canonically at Job 8:14, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
spider
Modern gloss
spider
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H5908 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.
Job 8:14
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Job 8:14.
Isaiah 59:5
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Isaiah 59:5.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 1 · 50%
  • Prophets 1 · 50%

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) 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: Shall be a spider's 1×, Spider's 1×
  • American Standard Version: Is a spider 1×, Spider 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Is in a spider’s 1×, Spider’s 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Spider 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H5908 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Shall be a spider's” 1×
  • “Spider's” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H5908 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Is a spider” 1×
  • “Spider” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H5908 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Is in a spider’s” 1×
  • “Spider’s” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H5908 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Spider” 2×

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.

  1. spider
  2. web (house of spider)

Word origin

n.m. spider (𝔗 עַכּוּבִיתָא, עַכָּבִיתָא; whence Arabic عَنْكَبُوتٌ as loan-wd.; NH עַכְשׁוּב prob. tarantula, according to LevyNHWB iii. 648);—בֵּית ע׳ Jb 8:14 i.e. web, so prob. 27:18 (reading ע׳ for MT עָשׁ); cf. קוּרֵי ע׳ Is 59:5 filaments of a spider.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Origin: probably from an unused root in the literal sense of entangling

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 1619


Forms in the corpus

The 2 distinct written forms H5908 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
עַ֝כָּבִ֗ישׁ Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute Job 8:14 1
עַכָּבִ֖ישׁ Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute Isaiah 59:5 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5908, 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.

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.