אָפֵל
gloomy
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H651 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.
Amos 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 adjective אפל centers on the idea of “gloomy.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. The word gravitates to Amos (100%). Found nowhere else but Amos 5:20. It shares a root with אפיל, אפל and אפלה. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H651 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
- Amos 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).
- King James Version: Very dark 1×
- American Standard Version: Very dark 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gloom 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gloom 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H651 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H651 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H651 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H651 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- gloomy, dark
Word origin
אָפֵל adj. gloomy, of day of י׳ Am 5:20
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to set as the sun
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.
אָפַל
- , only in Hif. הֶאֱפִיל (denom. of אָפֵל q. v.) to make dark, obscure. Sabb. 86ᵃ bot. מַאֲפִיל בטליתו he makes dark by spreading his cloak (cover) over himself. Y. B. Bath. III, 13ᶜ top עומד ומא׳ the tree stands there and takes the light away.—2) to be late in ripening, giving birth, &c.; to have late crops. Y. Shebi. V, beg. 35ᵈ שנים מַאֲפִילוֹת years slow in ripening, when the crop is delayed. Gen. R. s. 99 שהיא מַאֲפֶלֶת which has late crops.
אֲפַל
- Pa. אַפֵּיל as foreg. Hif. 1). B. Bath. 7ᵃ קא מאפלת עלי thou makest my building dark, obstructest my light.
אָפֵל I
- (√אף, v. אפף; cmp. אבל, הבל) [thick vapory,]
- 1. dark. Sabb. 86ᵃ, a. fr. בית א׳ a dark (windowless) house.—אֲפֵילָה f. dark place. Y. Naz. IX, 57ᵈ top; Pes. 81ᵇ בא׳, במים in water or in a dark place (cave).—Pl. fem. אֲפֵילוֹת. Lev. R. s. 9 מבואות א׳ dark alleys; a. fr.
- 2. heavy, sluggish, slow, late. Denom. האפיל, v. אָפַל.
אָפֵל II
- Keren Afel (Dark-Horn), name of a height. Taan. 22ᵇ עד שישב וכ׳ Ms. M. (ed. שיעמוד) until one sits on Ker. Afel and can bathe his feet in water. Ib. חזייא לי קרן א׳ … ed. (Ms. ההיא דוכתא) I have seen (that place) K. A.
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 H651, 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
- אפיל ʼâphîyl H648 ripe
- אפל ʼôphel H652 darkness
- אפלה ʼăphêlâh H653 darkness
- מאפל maʼăphêl H3990 darkness
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 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.
