שַׁבְּתַי
Shabbethai
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Shabbethai’ 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 H7678 appears in the Book of Ezra — 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.
Ezra
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.
“Shabbethai” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name שבתי (Shabbᵉthay). It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Nehemiah, which alone accounts for 67% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Ezra 10:15. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7678 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 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: Shabbethai 3×
- American Standard Version: Shabbethai 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Shabbethai 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Shabbethai 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7678 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7678 across 3 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 H7678 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7678 across 3 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.
- Shabbethai = "sabbatical"
- a Levite in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah
Word origin
n.pr. Levite;—Ezr 10:15; Ne 8:7; 11:16; Σαβ(β)αθαι, etc.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שבת (shabbâth) (H7676) — Sabbath.
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.
שַׁבְּתָא
- 1. Sabbath. Targ. Ex. XVI, 25, sq. Targ. Y. ib. 23 שַׁבָּא שַׁבַּת קודשא (O. שְׁבָתָא שְׁבַת ק׳, ed. Berl. שַׁבָּא שְׁבָתָא ק׳, v. next w.). Targ. Is. LVIII, 13; a. fr.—Ber. 28ᵃ גדרוש מר חדא ש׳ וכ׳ shall one (of them) preach one Sabbath, and the other the next Sabbath (alternately)? There will be jealousy. Sabb. 119ᵃ דיזיף ש׳, v. יְזַף. 118ᵃ, a. fr. מעלי ש׳, v. מֵעֲלָא. Gitt. 38ᵇ דקבעי … בש׳ וכ׳ who have their meals on the Sabbath during lecturing hours. Y. Ber. II, 5ᵇ bot. חזיא … בשו׳ וכ׳ saw mourners on the Sabbath, and saluted them; a. fr.—Pl. שַׁבְּתַיָּא, שַׁבְּתֵי. Targ. Hos. II, 13 שַׁבְּתָהָא (ed. Wil. שַׁבַּתָּ׳).—Ber. l. c. לדרוש … תלתא ש׳ וכ׳ let R. G. lecture three Sabbaths in succession, and R. El. b. Az. every fourth Sabbath. Snh. 67ᵇ כל מעלי ש׳ (some ed. sing.) every Sabbath eve; a. e.
- 2. week. Targ. Esth. II, 9; a. e.—Gen. R. s. 11 חד בש׳ the first day of the week; a. e.
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 3 distinct written forms H7678 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/שַׁבְּתַ֥י | Noun, Proper | Ezra 10:15 | 1 |
| וְ/שַׁבְּתַ֨י | Noun, Proper | Nehemiah 11:16 | 1 |
| שַׁבְּתַ֣י | Noun, Proper | Nehemiah 8:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7678, 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
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 → 3 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Shabbethai). 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
Sabbath-born, a Levite who assisted in expounding the law and investigating into the illegal marriages of the Jews (Ezra 10:15; Neh. 8:7; 11:16).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(sabbatical) a Levite in the time of Ezra. (Ezra 10:15) It is apparently the same who with Jeshua and others instructed the people in the knowledge of the law. (Nehemiah 8:7) (B.C. 450.)
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
my rest
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
