שְׂלָו
quail
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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H7958 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
Exodus 1 verse
Numbers 2 verses
- Numbers 11:31 שַׂלְוִים֮ n c fp There went forth a wind from Yahweh, and brought quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp, about a day's journey on this side, and a day's journey on the other side, round about the camp, and about two cubits above the surface of the earth.
- Numbers 11:32 הַ/שְּׂלָ֔ו ptcl def.art + n c fs The people rose up all that day, and all the night, and all the next day, and gathered the quails: he who gathered least gathered ten homers: and they spread them all abroad for themselves round about the camp.
Psalms 1 verse
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, שלו (sᵉlâv) means “quail.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Numbers (50% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Exodus 16:13. Sharing its root, it stands alongside שלה, שילה and שלה. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7958 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 →
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) 3 verses · 75%
- 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).
- King James Version: Quails 4×
- American Standard Version: Quails 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Quail 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Quail 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7958 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7958 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7958 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7958 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.
- quail
Word origin
n.f. Ex 16:13 quail (prob. foreign word; Arabic سَلْوَى, Syriac ܣܰܠܘܰܝ, Sam. ࠔࠋࠅࠉ );—quail, coturnix communis vel vulgaris (TristrNHB 229 ff. FFP 124 PostHast.DB. quail, Di Ex 16:13):—abs. coll. Nu 11:32 (J); Ex 16:13 (P), ψ 105:40 (in all Qr שְׂלָיו); pl. שַׂלְוִים Nu 11:31 (J; as if from sg. שַׂלְוֶה).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שלה (shâlâh) (H7951) — to be at rest.
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.
שְׂלָו
- , v. שְׂלָיו
שָׁלֵו
- v. שְׁלָה) [to be lax,] to rest, be at ease, careless. Gen. R. s. 84 (ref. to Job III, 26) לא שָׁלַוְתִּי מעשו וכ׳ I was not at ease on account of Esau, neither was I secure on account of Laban. e.g. Job 3:26
שָׁלֵו ²
- preced.) at ease, secure. Yalk. Gen. 138 בטח ושאנן וש׳ in safety, without care, and at ease; (Pirké d’R. El. ch. XXXVIII only בטח ושאנן).
שָׁלוּ
- , v. שָׁלוּתָא
שָׁלוּתָא
- (שְׁלֵי II) neglect, error, forgetfulness (corresp. to h. שְׁגָגָה). Targ. Lev. IV, 2 (Y. ed. Vien. שִׁלּוּ). Ib. V, 18. Targ. Num. XV, 24, sq.; a. fr.
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 H7958 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/שְּׂלָ֔ו | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 16:13 | 2 |
| שְׂלָ֑ו | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 105:40 | 1 |
| שַׂלְוִים֮ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Numbers 11:31 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7958, 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
- שילה Shîylôh H7886 tranquillity
- שלה shᵉlâh H7954 at ease
- שלו shelev H7959 ease
- שלו shâlêv H7961 quiet
- שלוה shalvâh H7962 quietness
- שלי shᵉlîy H7987 quietness
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 8 — not the complete family. 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.
