עָצֵל
to be sluggish
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”). Here: ‘be sluggish’
Form
- Jussive
- A third- or second-person volitional form expressing wish or command (“let him write”).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H6101 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Judges 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.
The Hebrew verb עצל centers on the idea of “to be sluggish.” It occurs a mere 1 verse across Scripture. The word gravitates to Judges (100%). Its lone occurrence is Judges 18:9. It shares a root with עצל and עצלות. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6101 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Judges 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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).
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†: Be not slothful 1×
- American Standard Version†: Be not slothful 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Hesitate 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: May you 1×, Slacken yourselves 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6101 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6101 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6101 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6101 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 1 sense the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
עצל I
Niphal
- be sluggish (NH in der. species, and deriv.; cf. Arabic عَظِلَ iii. stick fast in coitu, Lane2086; Syriac ܥܛܶܠ be stupid);—Impf. 2 mpl. אַל־תֵּעָֽצְלוּ לָלֶכֶת Ju 18:9 be not sluggish in going. e.g. Judges 18:9
עצל II sluggish, lazy
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
adj. sluggish, lazy;—always ע׳ abs.;—אִישׁ־ע׳ Pr 24:30; elsewhere subst. sluggard Pr 6:6, 9 + 10 times Pr + הֶע׳ 10:26.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
עָצַל
- , Hithpa. הִתְעַצֵּל, Nithpa. נִתְעַצֵּל (b. h. Nif.; v. עָצֵל; cmp. b. h. אצל) to withdraw one’s self, shirk the trouble of; to be careless, slothful; to consider one’s self exempt. Tam. II, 2 מימיו לא נ׳ הכהן מלהוציא וכ׳ never did a priest shirk the labor of carrying out the ashes. Lev. R. s. 19 (ref. to בעצלתים, Koh. X, 18) ע"י שהאדם הזה מִתְעַצֵּל מלכסות וכ׳ because that man considers himself exempt from covering his head as it is proper to do, he contracts rheumatism; ע"י שהאשה הזו מִתְעַצֶּלֶת וכ׳ because that woman is too careless (of chastity) to cover herself &c. Ib. ע"י שנִתְעַצְּלוּ … מלחנות וכ׳ because the Israelites shrank from encamping in discord. Y. B. Kam. IX, end, 7ᵃ נתעצלו ולא הקריבוהו they were slothful and failed to offer it up; a. fr. e.g. Ecclesiastes 10:18
עֲצַל
- , ch.,Ithpa. אִיעַצֵּל same. Pes. 85ᵃ דאתי לאִיעַצּוּלֵי ביה (not לעיצולי) one might be slothful about it (and fail to use the sacrifice up in due time).
עָצֵל
- [standing aside,] slow; sluggard; lazy. Deut. R. s. 5 מה ראה … ללמד לע׳ וכ׳ what reason had Solomon to make the sluggard learn from the ant (Prov. VI, 6)?; a. e.—Pl. עֲצֵלִים, עֲצֵלִין, עֲצֵי׳. Pes. 85ᵃ עֲצֵלֵי כהונה the negligent among the priests (opp. זָהִיר); a. e.—Fem. עֲצֵלָה; pl. עֲצֵלוֹת, עֲצֵי׳. Y. ib. I, 27ᶜ bot. הנשים ע׳ הן women are slow (opp. זריז). e.g. Proverbs 6:6
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6101, 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
