רָחֵל
ewe
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
1 verse where H7353 appears in the Construct state in the Book of Genesis. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Genesis
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.
At its core, רחל (râchêl) means “ewe.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (50% of all occurrences). It first appears in Genesis 31:38. Sharing its root, it stands alongside רחל. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7353 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 2 verses 50%
- Song of Solomon 1 verse 25%
- Isaiah 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 25%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 25%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Sheep 2×
- American Standard Version†: Ewes 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Sheep 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Ewes 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7353 across 4† 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7353 across 4† 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 H7353 across 4† 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 H7353 across 4† 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.
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- ewe
Word origin
I. n.f. Is 53:7 ewe;—abs. ר׳ Is 53:7; (in sim., ‖ שֶׂה); pl. רְחֵלִים Gn 32:15 (E; + עִזִּים, אֵילִים), Ct 6:6 (in sim.); sf. רְחֵלֶיךָ וְעִזֶּיךָ Gn 31:38 (E).
II. n. pr. f. (ewe, RSK 219);—Rachel, Ραχηλ, daughter of Laban and wife of Jacob: Gn 29:6, 9, 10, 11, 28, 29, 30 + 36 times Gn (JE 37 times, P 6 times), + קְבֻרַת(־)ר׳ 35:20 (JE), 1 S 10:2 (cf. אֶפְרָתָה 1, p. 68; on site vid. DrHast.DB. Rachel); ר׳ (in fig.) Je 31:15; ר׳ Ru 4:11 (in sim.).
— 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 journey
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.
רָחֵל I
- f. (b. h.) pr. n. f. Rachel,
- 1. wife of Jacob. Gen. R. s. 71 (play on עקרה, Gen. XXIX, 31) ר׳ תהיה עיקרו וכ׳ Rachel shall be the chief person of the household; ib. לפי שכל הדברים תלויין בר׳ וכ׳ because all depends on R., therefore is Israel called by her name; Ruth R. to IV, 11, v. עִיקָּר; a. v. fr. e.g. Genesis 29:31
- 2. R. Akiba’s wife. Ab. d’R. N. ch. VI.—3) R., mother of Rab Mari. Sabb. 154ᵃ; a. fr.
רָחֵל II
- (b. h.) ewe, sheep. Bekh. III, 1 ר׳ בת שתים וכ׳ if an ewe gives birth in her second year of age, the issue belongs to the priest with certainty. Ib. 20ᵃ. Tosef. Ḥull. X, 1 כלאיים מן הר׳ וכ׳ a hybrid of an ewe and a kid is subject to the law concerning the first of the fleece (Deut. XVIII, 4); a. fr.—Pl. רְחֵלוֹת, רְחֵלִים, רְחֵלִין, רְחֵי׳. Ib. 4 השוטף רְחֵלָיו if one washes his lambs (and wool comes out). Ib.; Ḥull. XI, 2 חמש ר׳ גוזזות וכ׳ five lambs yielding wool of the weight of &c. Ib. 137ᵇ דקא מתני ליה לבריה רחלים taught his son (the Mishnah l. c.) using r’ḥelim (according to Biblical usage); א"ל אתנייה רחלות said he to him, teach him r’ḥeloth (in accordance with later usage). Bekh. V, 3 זכר של ר׳, v. זָכָר. Sabb. V, 2; 4; a. fr. e.g. Deuteronomy 18:4
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 4 distinct written forms H7353 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הָֽ/רְחֵלִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 6:6 | 1 |
| וּ/כְ/רָחֵ֕ל | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 53:7 | 1 |
| רְחֵלִ֥ים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 32:14 | 1 |
| רְחֵלֶ֥י/ךָ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 31:38 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7353, 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.
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
