רַגְלִי
foot soldier
‘foot soldier’ is one of 2 main senses 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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 11 times (92%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (8%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 12 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7273 appears — 12 distinct verses across 9 books. 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Numbers 1 verse
Judges 1 verse
1 Samuel 2 verses
- 1 Samuel 4:10 רַגְלִֽי adj Adjective ms The Philistines fought, and Israel was struck, and they fled every man to his tent: and there was a very great slaughter; for there fell of Israel thirty thousand footmen.
- 1 Samuel 15:4 רַגְלִ֑י adj Adjective ms Saul summoned the people, and numbered them in Telaim, two hundred thousand footmen, and ten thousand men of Judah.
2 Samuel 2 verses
- 2 Samuel 8:4 רַגְלִ֑י adj Adjective ms David took from him one thousand seven hundred horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen: and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for one hundred chariots.
- 2 Samuel 10:6 רַגְלִ֔י adj Adjective ms When the children of Ammon saw that they were become odious to David, the children of Ammon sent and hired the Syrians of Beth Rehob, and the Syrians of Zobah, twenty thousand footmen, and the king of Maacah with one thousand men, and the men of Tob twelve thousand men.
1 Kings 1 verse
2 Kings 1 verse
1 Chronicles 2 verses
- 1 Chronicles 18:4 רַגְלִ֑י adj Adjective ms David took from him one thousand chariots, and seven thousand horsemen, and twenty thousand footmen; and David hamstrung all the chariot horses, but reserved of them for one hundred chariots.
- 1 Chronicles 19:18 רַגְלִ֑י adj Adjective ms The Syrians fled before Israel; and David killed of the Syrians [the men of] seven thousand chariots, and forty thousand footmen, and killed Shophach the captain of the host.
Jeremiah 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.
“foot soldier” is the headline sense of the Hebrew adjective רגלי (raglîy). Where the King James Version says “footmen,” newer translations reach for “foot soldiers” (Berean Standard Bible) and “foot” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 12 verses — uncommon. First canonically at Exodus 12:37, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7273 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 12 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Samuel 2 verses 17%
- 2 Samuel 2 verses 17%
- 1 Chronicles 2 verses 17%
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 12 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 17%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 17%
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: Footmen 7×
- American Standard Version: Footmen 7×
- Berean Standard Bible: Foot soldiers 6×, Foot 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Foot 5×, Foot soldiers 3×, Footsoldiers 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7273 across 8 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 4 further occurrences.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7273 across 9 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7273 across 10 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7273 across 12 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.
- on foot
- man on foot, footman, foot soldier
Word origin
adj. on foot;—אִישׁ ר׳ (after num.) footmen, especially foot-soldiers, Ju 20:2; 2 S 8:4 = 1 Ch 18:4; 1 Ch 19:18 (פָּרָשִׁים in ‖ 2 S 10:18); elsewhere ר׳ as subst., usually coll., of Isr. at Exod. Ex 12:37; Nu 11:21 (both JE); = foot-soldiery 1 S 4:10; 15:4; 2 S 10:6; 1 K 20:29; 2 K 13:7; n. pl. רַגְלִים footmen, men on foot Je 12:5 (opp. הַסּוּסִיס).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from רגל (regel) (H7272) — foot.
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.
רַגְלִי
- footman, runner. Snh. 96ᵃ נזדמן לו ר׳ וכ׳ a runner met him, and he ran before him … and was tired; Yalk. Jer. 290.
רִגְלַי
- , v. רִגְלָאָה
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 6 distinct written forms H7273 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| רַגְלִ֑י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 18:4 | 5 |
| רַגְלִ֔י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 10:6 | 2 |
| רַגְלִ֖י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 20:29 | 2 |
| רַגְלִ֛י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 12:37 | 1 |
| רַגְלִ֥ים | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 12:5 | 1 |
| רַגְלִֽי | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 4:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7273, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 12 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
- Exodus 12:37
- Numbers 11:21
- Judges 20:2
- 1 Samuel 4:10
- 2 Samuel 8:4
- 1 Kings 20:29
- 2 Kings 13:7
- 1 Chronicles 18:4
- Jeremiah 12:5
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.
