עַלְמָה
virgin
‘virgin’ is one of 3 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
- 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.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (57%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (43%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5959 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Exodus 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Song of Solomon 2 verses
Isaiah 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, עלמה (ʻalmâh) means “virgin.” Scripture first uses it in Genesis 24:43. It turns up in 7 verses across 6 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Song of Solomon (29%), then Genesis and Exodus. Catalogued under 3 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. 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 H5959 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Song of Solomon 2 verses 29%
- Genesis 1 verse 14%
- Exodus 1 verse 14%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 57%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 29%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 14%
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: Maid 2×
- American Standard Version: Behold 1×, Damsels 1×, Go and the maiden 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Maidens 3×, Maiden 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Young woman 3×, Marriageable women 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5959 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5959 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5959 across 7 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5959 across 7 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 3 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.
- virgin, young woman
- of marriageable age
- maid or newly married
Word origin
n.f. young woman (ripe sexually; maid or newly married);—ע׳ Gn 24:43 (J), Ex 2:8 (E), Pr 30:19 Is 7:14; pl. עֲלָמוֹת ψ 68:26 Ct 1:3; 6:8; עַל־עֲלָמוֹת to (the voice of) young women, either lit., or of soprano or falsetto of boys: 1 Ch 15:20 ψ 9:1 (read עַל־עֲלָמוֹת לַבֵּן [for עַל־מוּת לַבֵּן, ‘voce virginea a pueris decantandum,’ Thes), 46:1; 48:15 (read עַל־עֲלָמוֹת [for עַל־מוּת]; tr. prob. to 49:1).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from עלם (ʻelem) (H5958) — young man.
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.
עַלְמָה
- , v. עֶלֶם II
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 7 distinct written forms H5959 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/עַלְמָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 30:19 | 1 |
| הָ/עַלְמָ֗ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 7:14 | 1 |
| הָֽ/עַלְמָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 2:8 | 1 |
| הָֽ/עַלְמָה֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 24:43 | 1 |
| וַ/עֲלָמ֖וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 6:8 | 1 |
| עֲ֝לָמ֗וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 68:25 | 1 |
| עֲלָמ֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 1:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5959, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
