שִׂיב
elder
‘elder’ 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
- 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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 4 times (80%)
- Particle, Definite Article 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7868 appears — 5 distinct verses across 1 book. 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 5 verses
- Ezra 5:5 שָׂבֵ֣י n c mp cs But the eye of their God was on the elders of the Jews, and they did not make them cease, until the matter should come to Darius, and then answer should be returned by letter concerning it.
- Ezra 5:9 לְ/שָׂבַיָּ֣/א prep + n c mp det + ptcl def.art Then asked we those elders, and said to them thus, Who gave you a decree to build this house, and to finish this wall?
- Ezra 6:7 וּ/לְ/שָׂבֵ֣י conj + prep + n c mp cs let the work of this house of God alone; let the governor of the Jews and the elders of the Jews build this house of God in its place.
- Ezra 6:8 שָׂבֵ֤י n c mp cs Moreover I make a decree what you shall do to these elders of the Jews for the building of this house of God: that of the king's goods, even of the tribute beyond the River, expenses be given with all diligence to these men, that they be not hindered.
- Ezra 6:14 וְ/שָׂבֵ֤י conj + n c mp cs The elders of the Jews built and prospered, through the prophesying of Haggai the prophet and Zechariah the son of Iddo. They built and finished it, according to the commandment of the God of Israel, and according to the decree of Cyrus, and Darius, and Artaxerxes king of Persia.
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.
“elder” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb שיב (sîyb). With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Ezra, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. First canonically at Ezra 5:5, it enters the text early. Carrying more than one sense, it rewards its full sense range. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7868 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ezra 5 verses 100%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 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: Elders 5×
- American Standard Version: Elders 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Elders 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Elders of 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7868 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7868 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7868 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7868 across 5 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 the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 1 sense the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Pf. 1 s. זָקַנְתִּי וָשַׂ֫בְתִּי 1 S 12:2; Pt. שָׂב Jb 15:10 (+ יָשִׁישׁ aged). e.g. 1 Samuel 12:2
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. be hoary (NH שֵׂיבָה old age; Assyrian šêbu, aged man; Arabic شَابَ (ى) become hoary, Ethiopic ሤበ (in deriv.); Aramaic סִיב be old; ܣܶܐܒ grow old, ܣܰܝ̈ܒܳܬܳܐ grey hair);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שיב (sîyb) (H7867) — to be gray.
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.
שַׁב
- v. = h. שֶׁבַע, seven. Targ. Y. Gen. XXIX, 18; 20; 27; a. e.—Snh. 29ᵃ. Pes. 116ᵃ שב בנתיך thy seven daughters. Ḥull. 42ᵇ; a. fr.—שֵׁבְסְרֵי, שֵׁבְסַר, שִׁ׳, שֶׁ׳ (= שב עסר) seventeen. Targ. Y. Gen. VII, 11. Ib. XXXVII, 2; a. e.—B. Bath. 10ᵃ שֵׁיבְסַר דינרי seventeen Denars. Taan. 28ᵇ בש׳ בתמוז on the seventeenth day of Tammuz; a. fr.—שְׁבִיסְרָאָה the seventeenth. Targ. I Chr. XXIV, 15.
שֵׁיב
- seven, v. שַׁב I.
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 5 distinct written forms H7868 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/שָׂבֵ֤י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezra 6:14 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/שָׂבֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezra 6:7 | 1 |
| לְ/שָׂבַיָּ֣/א | Particle, Definite Article | Ezra 5:9 | 1 |
| שָׂבֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezra 5:5 | 1 |
| שָׂבֵ֤י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezra 6:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7868, 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 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
