שׁוֹבֵב
backsliding
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7728 appears in the Book of Jeremiah — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Jeremiah
- Jeremiah 31:22 הַ/שּֽׁוֹבֵבָ֑ה ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs How long will you go here and there, you backsliding daughter? for Yahweh has created a new thing in the earth: a woman shall encompass a man.
- Jeremiah 49:4 הַ/שּֽׁוֹבֵבָ֑ה ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs Why glory you in the valleys, your flowing valley, backsliding daughter? who trusted in her treasures, [saying], Who shall come to me?
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.
“backsliding” is the headline sense of the Hebrew adjective שובב (shôwbêb). A scarce word — 3 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. Scripture first uses it in Jeremiah 31:22. It shares a root with שוב, משובה and שובב. See the sense tree, 3-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7728 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Backsliding 1×, Thou backsliding 1×
- American Standard Version: Backsliding 1×, Thither 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Faithless 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Rebel 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7728 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7728 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7728 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7728 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- backturning, apostate, backsliding
Word origin
שׁוֹבֵב adj. backturning, apostate
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שוב (shûwb) (H7725) — to return.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H7728 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/שּֽׁוֹבֵבָ֑ה | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 31:22 | 2 |
| לְ/שׁוֹבֵ֥ב | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Micah 2:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7728, 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
- משובה mᵉshûwbâh H4878 apostasy
- שובב shôwbâb H7726 backsliding
- שובה shûwbâh H7729 withdrawal
- שיבה shîybâh H7870 restoration
- תוב tûwb H8421 to return
- תשובה tᵉshûwbâh H8666 answer
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- יושב חסד Yûwshab Cheçed H3142 Jushab-hesed
- ישבי לחם Yâshubîy Lechem H3433 Jashubi-lehem
- ישבעם Yâshobʻâm H3434 Jashobeam
- ישוב Yâshûwb H3437 Jashub
- משובב Mᵉshôwbâb H4877 Meshobab
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. 5 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist 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.
