צִיבָא
Ziba
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Ziba’ 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 H6717 appears — 13 distinct verses 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.
2 Samuel 13 verses
- 2 Samuel 9:2 צִיבָ֔א צִיבָ֖א n Proper n Proper There was of the house of Saul a servant whose name was Ziba, and they called him to David; and the king said to him, Are you Ziba? He said, Your servant is he.
- 2 Samuel 9:3 צִיבָא֙ n Proper The king said, Is there not yet any of the house of Saul, that I may show the kindness of God to him? Ziba said to the king, Jonathan has yet a son, who is lame of his feet.
- 2 Samuel 9:4 צִיבָא֙ n Proper The king said to him, Where is he? Ziba said to the king, Behold, he is in the house of Machir the son of Ammiel, in Lo Debar.
- 2 Samuel 9:9 צִיבָ֛א n Proper Then the king called to Ziba, Saul's servant, and said to him, "All that pertained to Saul and to all his house have I given to your master's son.
- 2 Samuel 9:10 וּ/לְ/צִיבָ֗א conj + prep + n Proper You shall till the land for him, you, and your sons, and your servants; and you shall bring in [the fruits], that your master's son may have bread to eat: but Mephibosheth your master's son shall eat bread always at my table." Now Ziba had fifteen sons and twenty servants.
- 2 Samuel 9:11 צִיבָא֙ n Proper Then said Ziba to the king, According to all that my lord the king commands his servant, so shall your servant do. As for Mephibosheth, [said the king], he shall eat at my table, as one of the king's sons.
- 2 Samuel 9:12 צִיבָ֔א n Proper Mephibosheth had a young son, whose name was Mica. All that lived in the house of Ziba were servants to Mephibosheth.
- 2 Samuel 16:1 צִיבָ֛א n Proper When David was a little past the top [of the ascent], behold, Ziba the servant of Mephibosheth met him, with a couple of donkeys saddled, and on them two hundred loaves of bread, and one hundred clusters of raisins, and one hundred summer fruits, and a bottle of wine.
- 2 Samuel 16:2 צִיבָ֖א צִ֠יבָא n Proper n Proper The king said to Ziba, What do you mean by these? Ziba said, The donkeys are for the king's household to ride on; and the bread and summer fruit for the young men to eat; and the wine, that such as are faint in the wilderness may drink.
- 2 Samuel 16:3 צִיבָ֜א n Proper The king said, Where is your master's son? Ziba said to the king, Behold, he abides at Jerusalem; for he said, Today will the house of Israel restore me the kingdom of my father.
- 2 Samuel 16:4 לְ/צִבָ֔א צִיבָא֙ prep + n Proper n Proper Then said the king to Ziba, Behold, all that pertains to Mephibosheth is yours. Ziba said, I do obeisance; let me find favor in your sight, my lord, O king.
- 2 Samuel 19:17 וְ/צִיבָ֗א conj + n Proper There were a thousand men of Benjamin with him, and Ziba the servant of the house of Saul, and his fifteen sons and his twenty servants with him; and they went through the Jordan in the presence of the king.
- 2 Samuel 19:29 וְ/צִיבָ֔א conj + n Proper The king said to him, Why speak you any more of your matters? I say, You and Ziba divide the land.
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.
“Ziba” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name ציבא (Tsîybâʼ). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in 2 Samuel. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 13 verses — uncommon. First canonically at 2 Samuel 9:2, it enters the text early. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6717 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,752
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,752 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Samuel 13 verses 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 13 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 13 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: Ziba 9×
- American Standard Version: Ziba 6×, Him 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Ziba 13×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ziba 13×, Was ziba 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6717 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H6717 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H6717 across 15 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6717 across 17 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.
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.
- Ziba = "statue"
- a servant of Saul whom David made steward of Jonathan's son Mephibosheth
Word origin
and (2 S 16:4) צִבָא16 n.pr.m. Σ(ε)ιβα: servant of Saul’s house, 2 S 9:2(×2) + 14 times 9, 16, 19.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from צובא (Tsôwbâʼ) (H6678) — Zoba.
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.
צִיבָּא
- = h. צָב II. Targ. Nah. II, 8 (ed. Wil. צִיבָא; h. text הֻצַּב!).—Pl. צִיבִּין, צִיבֵּי, צִבּ׳. Targ. Is. XLIX, 22 (ed. Wil. צִיבִין) (h. text חצן).
צִיבָּא II
- (preced.; cmp. גְּבָבָא); pl. צִיבֵּי rakings, chips, twigs &c. Targ. Y. Num. VII, 5 ויהון צ׳ וכ׳ (not צִיבִי) the chips (of the wood used for the wagons) shall be used for the altar pile.—B. Kam. 93ᵃ, v. נִכְסִין. Taan. 23ᵇ; a. fr.
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 10 distinct written forms H6717 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| צִיבָא֙ | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 9:3 | 4 |
| צִיבָ֔א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 9:2 | 2 |
| צִיבָ֖א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 9:2 | 2 |
| צִיבָ֛א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 9:9 | 2 |
| וְ/צִיבָ֔א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 19:29 | 1 |
| וְ/צִיבָ֗א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 19:17 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/צִיבָ֗א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 9:10 | 1 |
| לְ/צִבָ֔א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 16:4 | 1 |
| צִ֠יבָא | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 16:2 | 1 |
| צִיבָ֜א | Noun, Proper | 2 Samuel 16:3 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ziba). 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
Post; statue, "a servant of the house of Saul" (2 Sam. 9:2), who informed David that Mephibosheth, a son of Jonathan, was alive. He afterwards dealt treacherously toward Mephibosheth, whom he slanderously misrepresented to David.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(statue), a servant of Saul whom David made steward of Saul's son Mephibosheth. (2 Samuel 9:2-18; 16:1-4; 19:17,29) [Mephibosheth] (B.C. 1023.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
army; fight; strength
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 13 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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.
