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קֵבָה

belly

also: stomach, maw fuller range ↓

H6896 Strong's Hebrew
qêbâh Transliteration
/kay-baw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

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.

קבה (qêbâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “belly.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Deuteronomy 18:3. Ranging over 3 senses, its meaning includes “stomach” and “maw”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
maw
Modern gloss
belly
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 H6896 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.
Deuteronomy 18:3
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Deuteronomy 18:3.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 1 · 100%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • 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 1 distinct verse.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 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: Maw 1×
  • American Standard Version: Maw 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Stomach 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Stomach 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H6896 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Maw” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H6896 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Maw” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H6896 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Stomach” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H6896 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Stomach” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 3 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. stomach, belly, maw
  2. stomach (of sacrificial victim)
  3. belly (of woman)

Word origin

Derived from קבב (qâbab) (H6895) — to curse.

Part of speech: Noun Feminine TWOT: 1979a


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.

*קַבָּה

  • (denom. of נָקַב) curse. Snh. 92ᵃ top (ref. to יקבהו, Prov. XI, 26) אין ק׳ אלא קללה (Ms. F. קֹב; Ag. Hatt. קוֹב, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 1) kabbah (the noun from the same root as יקבהו) means curse (with ref. to Num. XXIII, 8); (Yalk. Prov. 947 יקבוהו); Sot. 41ᵇ קוֹב. e.g. Proverbs 11:26

*קִבָּה

  • (denom. of קַב 2) to put the leg in a ḳab, to put on a wooden leg (pretending to be lame). Keth. 68ᵃ המְקַבֶּה את רגליו ואת שוקו Ar. ed. Koh. (read: … רגלו והמקפח את שוקו; ed. Only המקפח את שוקו), v. קָפַח.

קֵבָה

  • maw. Ḥull. XI, 1. Ib. 134ᵇ (ref. to Deut. XVIII, 3) להביא חלב שע"ג הק׳ וכ׳ this (הַ) serves to include the fat surrounding and inside the maw; a. e.—Esp. rennet, used to curdle milk. Ab. Zar. II, 5 קֵיבַת נבלה, קיבה של נ׳, v. עָמַד. Ib. קיבת עולה rennet of a burnt-offering. Y. Bets. I, 60ᵃ קיבת הגוי rennet supplied by a gentile. Ib. bot. ק׳ ממקום אחר באת the rennet in the maw comes from outside (is not considered a part of the animal itself); a. fr.—Pl. קֵבוֹת, קֵי׳. Ib. התירו קֵיבוֹתֵיהֶם they allowed to use the rennets of these sheep; Y. Ab. Zar. II, 41ᶜ bot. e.g. Deuteronomy 18:3

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 H6896, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — 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.

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).

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