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צֶאֱלִים

lotus

‘lotus’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H6628 Strong's Hebrew
tseʼel Transliteration
/tseh'-el/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

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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 noun צאל centers on the idea of “lotus.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Job (100%). First canonically at Job 40:21, it enters the text early. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
shady tree
Modern gloss
lotus
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H6628 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Job 40:21
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Job 40:21.
Job 40:22
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Job 40:22.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

  • Job 2 verses 100%

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 2 · 100%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 2 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 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: Shady trees 1×, Under the shady trees 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Lotus plants 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lotus trees 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H6628 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Shady trees” 1×
  • “Under the shady trees” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H6628 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Lotus plants” 2×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H6628 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Lotus trees” 2×

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.

  1. a kind of lotus
  2. a thorny lotus shrub

Word origin

n.m.pl. a kind of lotus (Rhamnus (more exactly Zizyphus), Lotus [Linn.], thorny lotus (not sacred Nymphaea Lotus); Saad. ضَالٌ, cf. AW De Job 2, Syriac ܥܳܐܠܴܐ, v. Löwp. 275);—Jb 40:21, 22.

— 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 be slender

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 1863


Forms in the corpus

The 2 distinct written forms H6628 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
צֶאֱלִ֣ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Job 40:22 1
צֶאֱלִ֥ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Job 40:21 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.