קְעִילָה
Keilah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Keilah’ 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 H7084 appears in the Book of Joshua — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Joshua
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.
“Keilah” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name קעילה (Qᵉʻîylâh). More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in 1 Samuel. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 16 verses — uncommon. Its earliest occurrence is Joshua 15:44. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7084 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 →
- 16
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 16 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,612
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,612 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 16 occurrences in the concordance →
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 16 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 13 verses · 81%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 19%
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: Keilah 17×
- American Standard Version: Keilah 17×
- Berean Standard Bible: Keilah 17×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Keilah 18×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7084 across 18 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7084 across 18 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7084 across 18 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7084 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Keilah = "fortress"
- a city in the lowlands of Judah northwest of Hebron
Word origin
n.pr.loc. Κεειλα: in Judah, toward Philistines, ק׳ 1 S 23:1 + 13 times 23 (קְעִלָה, v 3, 13); Jos 15:44 (P), cf. 2 Ch 4:19 (geneal. scheme); post-ex. פֶּלֶךְ קְעִילָה Ne 3:17, 18; mod. Kîlā, c. 8 m. NW. from Hebron, GASmGeogr. 230 BuhlGeogr. 193; cl. TelAm. Ḳilti Wkl No. 165, 11, 18, etc..
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from קלע (qâlaʻ) (H7049) — to sling.
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.
קְעִילָה
- , Erub. 63ᵇ, v. קִלְעָא I.—Pl. קְעִילִין, Snh. 106ᵃ Ar.; Yalk. Num. 771, v. קֶלַע III.
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 12 distinct written forms H7084 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| קְעִילָ֑ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:6 | 3 |
| קְעִילָֽה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:2 | 3 |
| קְעִילָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:4 | 2 |
| קְעִילָ֖ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Chronicles 4:19 | 2 |
| בִּ/קְעִילָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:1 | 1 |
| וּ/קְעִילָ֥ה | Noun, Proper | Joshua 15:44 | 1 |
| מִ/קְּעִילָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:13 | 1 |
| מִ/קְּעִלָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:13 | 1 |
| קְעִילָ֛ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:12 | 1 |
| קְעִילָ֜ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:5 | 1 |
| קְעִילָ֨ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:11 | 1 |
| קְעִלָ֔ה | Noun, Proper | 1 Samuel 23:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7084, 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
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Keilah). 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
Citadel, a city in the lowlands of Judah (Josh. 15:44). David rescued it from the attack of the Philistines (1 Sam. 23:1-8); but the inhabitants proving unfaithful to him, in that they sought to deliver him up to Saul (13), he and his men "departed from Keilah, and went whithersoever they could go." They fled to the hill Hareth, about 3 miles to the east, and thence through Hebron to Ziph (q.v.). "And David was in the wilderness of Ziph, in a wood" (1 Sam. 23:15). Here Jonathan sought him out, "and strengthened his hand in God." This was the last interview between David and Jonathan (23:16-18). It is the modern Khurbet Kila. Others identify it with Khuweilfeh, between Beit Jibrin (Eleutheropolis) and Beersheba, mentioned in the Amarna tablets.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(fortress), a city of the Shefelah, or lowland district of Judah. (Joshua 15:44) Its main interest consists in its connection with David. (1 Samuel 23:7-13) It is represented by Kila, a site with ruins, on the lower road from Beit Jibria to Hebron.
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 16 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.
