עֶלְיוֹן
Most High
‘Most High’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (75%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5946 appears — 4 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.
Daniel 4 verses
- Daniel 7:18 עֶלְיוֹנִ֑ין adj Adjective mp But the saints of the Most High shall receive the kingdom, and possess the kingdom forever, even forever and ever.
- Daniel 7:22 עֶלְיוֹנִ֑ין adj Adjective ms until the ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the Most High, and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.
- Daniel 7:25 עֶלְיוֹנִ֖ין adj Adjective mp He shall speak words against the Most High, and shall wear out the saints of the Most High; and he shall think to change the times and the law; and they shall be given into his hand until a time and times and half a time.
- Daniel 7:27 עֶלְיוֹנִ֑ין adj Adjective mp The kingdom and the dominion, and the greatness of the kingdoms under the whole the sky, shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High: his kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him.
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, עליון (ʻelyôwn) means “Most High.” It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Daniel (100%). It first appears in Daniel 7:18. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5946 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 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: Most high 4×
- American Standard Version: Most high 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Most high 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Most high 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5946 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5946 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5946 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5946 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- the Most High
- of God
Word origin
[ עֶלְיוֹן ] adj. id. [ xp.ae.ac ] (BH id.);—pl. of God
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עליון (ʻelyôwn) (H5945) — Most High.
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.
עֶלְיוֹן
- uppermost, highest; most high. B. Mets. X, 2 הע׳ the owner of the upper story, v. מַעֲזִיבָה. Y. Bicc. II, 64ᵈ bot. (ref. to הקדש, Deut. XXVI, 13) הקודש הע׳ במשמע if refers to the sacred matter mentioned above (first-fruits, ib. 2, sq.). Maasr. V, 8 זרע לוף הע׳ the seed- capsules on the tops of lof (v. לוֹף), expl. Y. ib. 52ᵃ bot., v. סָלַל I; a. fr.—Fem. עֶלְיוֹנָה. Tanḥ. Tsav 1 (play on עוֹלָה) שהיא ע׳ וכ׳ it is the highest of all sacrifices. B. Bath. 64ᵃ דיוטא הע׳ the upper story. B. Mets. 77ᵇ יד לוקח על הע׳ the buyer is at an advantage, has the choice between annulling and insisting on the bargain, opp. על התחתונה, v. יָד.—Lev. R. s. 24, beg. (ref. to Ps. XCII, 9) לעולם ידך בע׳ thy power is always uppermost, i.e. is always submitted to, whether thou blessest or punishest; Yalk. Ps. 843 על הע׳; Y. Ber. IX, 14ᵇ על הע׳, לע׳; a. fr.—Pl. עֶלְיוֹנִים, עֶלְיוֹנִין; f. עֶלְיוֹנוֹת. Ib. 14ᵃ top המים הע׳ the waters from above the earth; a. fr.—Esp. עליונים heavenly creatures, angels. Lev. R. s. 9 בראשון ברא מן הע׳ וכ׳ on the first he created heavenly and earthly things &c.; בראו מן הע׳ וכ׳ he created man so as to make him partake of the nature of the upper creatures and of that of the lower; a. fr. e.g. Deuteronomy 26:13
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 2 distinct written forms H5946 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| עֶלְיוֹנִ֑ין | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 7:18 | 3 |
| עֶלְיוֹנִ֖ין | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 7:25 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
