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שָׁלַב

to be bound

H7947 Strong's Hebrew
shâlab Transliteration
/shaw-lab'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 2 appearances

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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.

שלב — transliterated shâlab — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to be bound.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Exodus. Debuting at Exodus 26:17, it then recurs through the corpus. It shares a root with שלב. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
equally distant
Modern gloss
to be bound
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H7947 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 →

2
distinct verses
The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Exodus 26:17
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Exodus 26:17.
Exodus 36:22
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Exodus 36:22.
#4,807
by frequency
Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 2 · 100%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 2 distinct verses.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 2 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: Equally distant 1×, Set in order 1×
  • American Standard Version: Joined 1×, To 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Must be connected 1×, Were connected 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Joining 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H7947 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Equally distant” 1×
  • “Set in order” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H7947 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Joined” 1×
  • “To” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H7947 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Must be connected” 1×
  • “Were connected” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H7947 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Joining” 2×

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.

  1. (Pual) to be bound, be joined, be joined together

Word origin

[ שָׁלַב ] vb. Pu. be bound, joined

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Origin: a primitive root

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 2390


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.

שְׁלַב

  • , Pa. שַׁלֵּב (b. h., v. לָבַב) to join, fit in with mortise and tenon. Part. pass. מְשַׁלַּב; pl. מְשַׁלְּבִין. Targ. O. Ex. XXVI, 17; XXXVI, 22.—Kidd. 73ᵇ top מְשַׁלְּבֵי הדמיה R. Ḥan. (ed. משלטי) if the limbs (of the exposed infant) are set (v. עָצַב).

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.


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7947, 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.

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.