שָׁלֹשׁ
three
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7969 appears in the Book of 1 Samuel — 21 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.
1 Samuel
- 1 Samuel 1:24 שְׁלֹשָׁה֙ adj Cardinal number ms When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, with three bulls, and one ephah of meal, and a bottle of wine, and brought him to the house of Yahweh in Shiloh: and the child was young.
- 1 Samuel 2:13 שְׁלֹ֥שׁ adj Cardinal number fs The custom of the priests with the people was that when any man offered sacrifice, the priest's servant came, while the flesh was boiling, with a flesh-hook of three teeth in his hand;
- 1 Samuel 2:21 שְׁלֹשָֽׁה adj Cardinal number ms Yahweh visited Hannah, and she conceived, and bore three sons and two daughters. The child Samuel grew before Yahweh.
- 1 Samuel 9:20 שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs As for your donkeys who were lost three days ago, don't set your mind on them; for they are found. For whom is all that is desirable in Israel? Is it not for you, and for all your father's house?
- 1 Samuel 10:3 שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה שְׁלֹ֨שֶׁת֙ adj Cardinal number ms adj Cardinal number ms adj Cardinal number ms cs Then shall you go on forward from there, and you shall come to the oak of Tabor; and there shall meet you there three men going up to God to Bethel, one carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread, and another carrying a bottle of wine:
- 1 Samuel 11:8 שְׁלֹ֣שׁ adj Cardinal number fs He numbered them in Bezek; and the children of Israel were three hundred thousand, and the men of Judah thirty thousand.
- 1 Samuel 11:11 שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה adj Cardinal number ms It was so on the next day, that Saul put the people in three companies; and they came into the midst of the camp in the morning watch, and struck the Ammonites until the heat of the day: and it happened, that those who remained were scattered, so that no two of them were left together.
- 1 Samuel 13:2 שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs Saul chose him three thousand men of Israel, of which two thousand were with Saul in Michmash and in the Mount of Bethel, and one thousand were with Jonathan in Gibeah of Benjamin: and the rest of the people he sent every man to his tent.
- 1 Samuel 13:17 שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה adj Cardinal number ms The spoilers came out of the camp of the Philistines in three companies: one company turned to the way that leads to Ophrah, to the land of Shual;
- 1 Samuel 13:21 וְ/לִ/שְׁלֹ֥שׁ conj + prep + Adjective Cardinal number fs yet they had a file for the mattocks, and for the plowshares, and for the forks, and for the axes, and to set the goads.
- 1 Samuel 17:13 שְׁלֹ֤שֶׁת שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs adj Cardinal number ms cs The three eldest sons of Jesse had gone after Saul to the battle: and the names of his three sons who went to the battle were Eliab the firstborn, and next to him Abinadab, and the third Shammah.
- 1 Samuel 17:14 וּ/שְׁלֹשָׁה֙ conj + Adjective Cardinal number ms David was the youngest; and the three eldest followed Saul.
- 1 Samuel 20:20 שְׁלֹ֥שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs I will shoot three arrows on the side of it, as though I shot at a mark.
- 1 Samuel 20:41 שָׁלֹ֣שׁ adj Cardinal number fs As soon as the boy was gone, David arose out of [a place] toward the South, and fell on his face to the ground, and bowed himself three times: and they kissed one another, and wept one with another, until David exceeded.
- 1 Samuel 24:2 שְׁלֹ֧שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs Then Saul took three thousand chosen men out of all Israel, and went to seek David and his men on the rocks of the wild goats.
- 1 Samuel 25:2 שְׁלֹֽשֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs There was a man in Maon, whose possessions were in Carmel; and the man was very great, and he had three thousand sheep, and a thousand goats: and he was shearing his sheep in Carmel.
- 1 Samuel 26:2 שְׁלֹֽשֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs Then Saul arose, and went down to the wilderness of Ziph, having three thousand chosen men of Israel with him, to seek David in the wilderness of Ziph.
- 1 Samuel 30:12 שְׁלֹשָׁ֥ה וּ/שְׁלֹשָׁ֥ה adj Cardinal number ms conj + Adjective Cardinal number ms They gave him a piece of a cake of figs, and two clusters of raisins: and when he had eaten, his spirit came again to him; for he had eaten no bread, nor drunk any water, three days and three nights.
- 1 Samuel 30:13 שְׁלֹשָֽׁה adj Cardinal number ms David said to him, To whom belong you? and whence are you? He said, I am a young man of Egypt, servant to an Amalekite; and my master left me, because three days ago I fell sick.
- 1 Samuel 31:6 וּ/שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת conj + Adjective Cardinal number ms cs So Saul died, and his three sons, and his armor bearer, and all his men, that same day together.
- 1 Samuel 31:8 שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs It happened on the next day, when the Philistines came to strip the slain, that they found Saul and his three sons fallen on Mount Gilboa.
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.
The Hebrew noun שלוש centers on the idea of “three.” Debuting at Genesis 5:22, it then recurs through the corpus. It appears 381 verses across 25 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its common vocabulary. It shares a root with שלושים, שליש and שלישי. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7969 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 →
- 381
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 381 distinct verses.
- 25 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 25 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #114
- by frequency
- Top 250 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 114 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 381 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 1 Chronicles 35 verses 9%
- Numbers 33 verses 9%
- Genesis 27 verses 7%
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 381 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 153 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 128 verses · 34%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 100 verses · 26%
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: Three 288×, Were three 11×, Thirteenth 10×
- American Standard Version: Three 269×, Thirteenth 9×, Thirteen 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Three 223×, Third 10×, Thirteenth 10×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Three 228×, Were 31×, And 11×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7969 across 424 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 43 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 6 further occurrences.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7969 across 424 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 57 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7969 across 343 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 33 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 86 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7969 across 369 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 27 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 79 further occurrences.
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.
- three, triad
Word origin
Origin: a primitive number
Forms in the corpus
The 122 distinct written forms H7969 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.
The 60 most common forms are shown; 62 rarer forms follow in the full concordance.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7969, 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
- שלושים shᵉlôwshîym H7970 thirty
- שליש shâlîysh H7991 officer
- שלישי shᵉlîyshîy H7992 third
- תלת tᵉlâth H8532 three
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 360 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 381 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
- Genesis 5:22
- Exodus 2:2
- Leviticus 12:4
- Numbers 1:23
- Deuteronomy 4:41
- Joshua 1:11
- Judges 1:20
- 1 Samuel 1:24
- 2 Samuel 2:18
- 1 Kings 2:11
- 2 Kings 2:17
- 1 Chronicles 2:3
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.
