פָּסִיל
idol
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
3 verses where H6456 appears in the Construct state in the Book of Isaiah. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 10:10 וּ/פְסִ֣ילֵי/הֶ֔ם conj + n c mp cs + sfx pers 3mp As my hand has found the kingdoms of the idols, whose engraved images did excel them of Jerusalem and of Samaria;
- Isaiah 21:9 פְּסִילֵ֥י n c mp cs and, behold, here comes a troop of men, horsemen in pairs. He answered, Fallen, fallen is Babylon; and all the engraved images of her gods are broken to the ground.
- Isaiah 30:22 פְּסִילֵ֣י n c mp cs You shall defile the overlaying of your engraved images of silver, and the plating of your molten images of gold: you shall cast them away as an unclean thing; you shall tell it, Get you hence.
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.
“idol” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun פסיל (pᵉçîyl). Older and newer Bibles part ways — “graven images” in the King James Version, “idols” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It turns up in 24 verses across 9 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is Deuteronomy 7:5. It clusters with פסל and פסל under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6456 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 →
- 24
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 24 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,327
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,327 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 24 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 5 verses 21%
- Isaiah 4 verses 17%
- Jeremiah 4 verses 17%
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 24 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 63%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 25%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 verses · 13%
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: Graven images 16×, All the graven images 2×, Carved images 2×
- American Standard Version: Graven images 17×, All the graven images 2×, Quarries 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Idols 13×, Carved images 4×, Images 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Idols 10×, Carved images 4×, And 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6456 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6456 across 25 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H6456 across 23 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H6456 across 27 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 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 1 sense 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.
- image, idol, graven image
Word origin
Derived from פסל (pâçal) (H6458) — to hew.
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.
פָּסִיל
- 1. hewn image. — Pl. פְּסִילִים. Y. Ber. IV, 8ᵃ ויחללוה עובדי פ׳ and which idolaters have desecrated. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXX הפ׳ של בית וכ׳ the images of the house of Pharaoh her father; a. e.
- 2. chisel, v. פְּסִילָה.—[Y. Ned. I, 37ᵃ top; Y. Naz. I, beg. 51ᵃ נזיר פסילים, v. פְּסִילּוֹס.]
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 22 distinct written forms H6456 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6456, 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
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 20 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 24 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
- Deuteronomy 7:5
- Judges 3:19
- 2 Kings 17:41
- 2 Chronicles 33:19
- Isaiah 10:10
- Jeremiah 8:19
- Hosea 11:2
- Micah 1:7
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.
