פְּלֵתִי
Pelethites
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Pelethites’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Noun type
- Gentilic
- A noun naming a member of a people, tribe, or region of origin (e.g. an Israelite, a Moabite).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6432 appears — 7 distinct verses across 3 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.
2 Samuel 4 verses
- 2 Samuel 8:18 וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֑י conj + ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada [was over] the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and David's sons were chief ministers.
- 2 Samuel 15:18 הַ/פְּלֵתִ֑י ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms All his servants passed on beside him; and all the Cherethites, and all the Pelethites, and all the Gittites, six hundred men who came after him from Gath, passed on before the king.
- 2 Samuel 20:7 וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֖י conj + ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms There went out after him Joab's men, and the Cherethites and the Pelethites, and all the mighty men; and they went out of Jerusalem, to pursue after Sheba the son of Bichri.
- 2 Samuel 20:23 הַ/פְּלֵתִֽי ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms Now Joab was over all the host of Israel; and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada was over the Cherethites and over the Pelethites;
1 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 1:38 וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֔י conj + ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms So Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites and the Pelethites, went down, and caused Solomon to ride on king David's mule, and brought him to Gihon.
- 1 Kings 1:44 וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֑י conj + ptcl def.art + n Gentilic ms and the king has sent with him Zadok the priest, and Nathan the prophet, and Benaiah the son of Jehoiada, and the Cherethites and the Pelethites; and they have caused him to ride on the king's mule;
1 Chronicles 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.
פלתי — transliterated Pᵉlêthîy — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Pelethites.” Its uses cluster heavily in 2 Samuel (57% of all occurrences). With 7 verses in 3 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Debuting at 2 Samuel 8:18, it then recurs through the corpus. See 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6432 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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
- 2 Samuel 4 verses 57%
- 1 Kings 2 verses 29%
- 1 Chronicles 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 86%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Pelethites 5×
- American Standard Version: Pelethites 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pelethites 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Pelethites 5×, Pelethite 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6432 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6432 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6432 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6432 across 7 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.
- Pelethites = "couriers"
- a collective name for the guardsmen of David
Word origin
פְּלֵתִי adj.gent. from unknown n.pr.; only c. art. as n. coll. of David’s guard
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פלת (Peleth) (H6431) — Peleth.
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.
פְּלֵתִי
- (b. h.) gent. n. P’lethi, Pelethi; (collect.) the body-guard of David; (homilet.) the Urim and Tummim; (oth. opin.) the Sanhedrin. Ber. 4ᵃ; Snh. 16ᵇ, v. מוּפְלָא.
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 5 distinct written forms H6432 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֑י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 18:17 | 3 |
| הַ/פְּלֵתִ֑י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 15:18 | 1 |
| הַ/פְּלֵתִֽי | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 20:23 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֔י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 1:38 | 1 |
| וְ/הַ/פְּלֵתִ֖י | Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 20:7 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Pelethites). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Mentioned always along with the Cherethites, and only in the time of David. The word probably means "runners" or "couriers," and may denote that while forming part of David's bodyguard, they were also sometimes employed as couriers (2 Sam. 8:18; 20:7, 23;1 Kings 1:38, 44; 1 Chr. 18:17). Some, however, think that these are the names simply of two Philistine tribes from which David selected his body-guard. They are mentioned along with the Gittites (2 Sam. 15:18), another body of foreign troops whom David gathered round him.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(couriers). [Cherethites]
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
judges; destroyers
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
