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.
12 verses where H7969 appears in the Absolute state in the Book of Ezekiel. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Ezekiel
- Ezekiel 4:5 שְׁלֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs For I have appointed the years of their iniquity to be to you a number of days, even three hundred ninety days: so shall you bear the iniquity of the house of Israel.
- Ezekiel 4:9 שְׁלֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs Take for yourself also wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and spelt, and put them in one vessel, and make you bread of it; [according to] the number of the days that you shall lie on your side, even three hundred ninety days, shall you eat of it.
- Ezekiel 40:10 שְׁלֹשָׁ֤ה וּ/שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה לִ/שְׁלָשְׁתָּ֑/ם adj Cardinal number ms conj + Adjective Cardinal number ms prep + Adjective Cardinal number ms cs + sfx pers 3mp The lodges of the gate eastward were three on this side, and three on that side; they three were of one measure: and the posts had one measure on this side and on that side.
- Ezekiel 40:11 שְׁל֥וֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs He measured the breadth of the opening of the gate, ten cubits; and the length of the gate, thirteen cubits;
- Ezekiel 40:21 שְׁלוֹשָׁ֤ה וּ/שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה adj Cardinal number ms conj + Adjective Cardinal number ms The lodges of it were three on this side and three on that side; and the posts of it and the arches of it were after the measure of the first gate: the length of it was fifty cubits, and the breadth twenty-five cubits.
- Ezekiel 40:48 שָׁלֹ֤שׁ וְ/שָׁלֹ֥שׁ adj Cardinal number fs conj + Adjective Cardinal number fs Then he brought me to the porch of the house, and measured each post of the porch, five cubits on this side, and five cubits on that side: and the breadth of the gate was three cubits on this side, and three cubits on that side.
- Ezekiel 41:6 שָׁל֧וֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs The side-chambers were in three stories, one over another, and thirty in order; and they entered into the wall which belonged to the house for the side-chambers round about, that they might have hold [therein], and not have hold in the wall of the house.
- Ezekiel 41:22 שָׁלוֹשׁ֩ adj Cardinal number fs The altar was of wood, three cubits high, and the length of it two cubits; and the corners of it, and the length of it, and the walls of it, were of wood: and he said to me, This is the table that is before Yahweh.
- Ezekiel 48:31 שְׁלוֹשָׁ֖ה adj Cardinal number ms and the gates of the city shall be after the names of the tribes of Israel, three gates northward: the gate of Reuben, one; the gate of Judah, one; the gate of Levi, one.
- Ezekiel 48:32 שְׁלֹשָׁ֑ה adj Cardinal number ms At the east side four thousand and five hundred [reeds], and three gates: even the gate of Joseph, one; the gate of Benjamin, one; the gate of Dan, one.
- Ezekiel 48:33 שְׁלֹשָׁ֑ה adj Cardinal number ms At the south side four thousand and five hundred [reeds] by measure, and three gates: the gate of Simeon, one; the gate of Issachar, one; the gate of Zebulun, one.
- Ezekiel 48:34 שְׁלֹשָׁ֑ה adj Cardinal number ms At the west side four thousand and five hundred [reeds], with their three gates: the gate of Gad, one; the gate of Asher, one; the gate of Naphtali, one.
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.
