אָבֵל מְחוֹלָה
Abel Meholah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Abel Meholah’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H65 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Judges 1 verse
1 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 4:12 אָבֵ֣ל מְחוֹלָ֔ה n Proper n Proper Baana the son of Ahilud, in Taanach and Megiddo, and all Beth-shean which is beside Zarethan, beneath Jezreel, from Beth-shean to Abel Meholah, as far as beyond Jokmeam;
- 1 Kings 19:16 מֵ/אָבֵ֣ל מְחוֹלָ֔ה prep + n Proper n Proper and Jehu the son of Nimshi shall you anoint to be king over Israel; and Elisha the son of Shaphat of Abel Meholah shall you anoint to be prophet in your room.
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.
“Abel Meholah” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name אבל מחולה (ʼÂbêl Mᵉchôwlâh). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 3 verses. It clusters heavily in 1 Kings, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is Judges 7:22. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H65 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Abelmeholah 3×
- American Standard Version: Abel-meholah 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Abel-meholah 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Abel 3×, Meholah 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H65 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H65 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H65 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H65 across 7 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.
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.
- Abel Meholah = "meadow of dancing"
- a city of Issachar, birthplace of Elisha
Word origin
Derived from אבל (ʼâbêl) (H58) — meadow (from verb.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H65 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מְחוֹלָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 4:12 | 2 |
| אָבֵ֣ל | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 4:12 | 1 |
| אָבֵ֥ל | Noun, Proper | Judges 7:22 | 1 |
| מְחוֹלָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | Judges 7:22 | 1 |
| מֵ/אָבֵ֣ל | Noun, Proper | 1 Kings 19:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H65, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- אבל ʼÂbêl H59 Abel-beth-maachah
- אבל ביתמעכה ʼÂbêl Bêyth-Măʻakâh H62 Abel Beth Maachah
- אבל השטים ʼÂbêl hash-Shiṭṭîym H63 Abel Shittim
- אבל כרמים ʼÂbêl Kᵉrâmîym H64 Abel Keramim
- אבל מים ʼAbêl Mayim H66 Abel Maim
- אבל מצרים ʼÂbêl Mitsrayim H67 Abel Mizraim
- מחלתי Mᵉchôlâthîy H4259 Meholathite
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 9 — not the complete family. 7 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Abel Meholah). 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
Meadow of dancing, or the dancing-meadow, the birth-place and residence of the prophet Elisha, not far from Beth-shean (1 Kings 4:12), in the tribe of Issachar, near where the Wady el-Maleh emerges into the valley of the Jordan, "the rich meadow-land which extends about 4 miles south of Beth-shean; moist and luxuriant." Here Elisha was found at his plough by Elijah on his return up the Jordan valley from Horeb (1 Kings 19:16). It is now called Ain Helweh.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(meadow of the dance), in the northern pat of the Jordan valley, (1 Kings 4:12) to which the routed Bedouin host fled from Gideon, (Judges 7:22) Here Elisha was found at his plough by Elijah returning up the valley from Horeb. (1 Kings 19:16-19)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
mourning of sickness
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
