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 Judges — 18 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.
Judges
- Judges 1:20 שְׁלֹשָׁ֖ה adj Cardinal number ms They gave Hebron to Caleb, as Moses had spoken: and he drove out there the three sons of Anak.
- Judges 7:6 שְׁלֹ֥שׁ adj Cardinal number fs The number of those who lapped, putting their hand to their mouth, was three hundred men: but all the rest of the people bowed down on their knees to drink water.
- Judges 7:7 בִּ/שְׁלֹשׁ֩ prep + Adjective Cardinal number fs Yahweh said to Gideon, By the three hundred men who lapped will I save you, and deliver the Midianites into your hand; and let all the people go every man to his place.
- Judges 7:8 וּ/בִ/שְׁלֹשׁ conj + prep + Adjective Cardinal number fs So the people took food in their hand, and their trumpets; and he sent all the men of Israel every man to his tent, but retained the three hundred men: and the camp of Midian was beneath him in the valley.
- Judges 7:16 שְׁלֹשׁ שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה adj Cardinal number fs adj Cardinal number ms He divided the three hundred men into three companies, and he put into the hands of all of them trumpets, and empty pitchers, with torches within the pitchers.
- Judges 7:20 שְׁלֹ֨שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs The three companies blew the trumpets, and broke the pitchers, and held the torches in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands with which to blow; and they cried, The sword of Yahweh and of Gideon.
- Judges 7:22 שְׁלֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs They blew the three hundred trumpets, and Yahweh set every man's sword against his fellow, and against all the host; and the host fled as far as Beth-shittah toward Zererah, as far as the border of Abel Meholah, by Tabbath.
- Judges 8:4 וּ/שְׁלֹשׁ conj + Adjective Cardinal number fs Gideon came to the Jordan, [and] passed over, he, and the three hundred men who were with him, faint, yet pursuing.
- Judges 9:22 שָׁלֹ֥שׁ adj Cardinal number fs Abimelech was prince over Israel three years.
- Judges 9:43 לִ/שְׁלֹשָׁ֣ה prep + Adjective Cardinal number ms He took the people, and divided them into three companies, and laid wait in the field; and he looked, and, behold, the people came forth out of the city; He rose up against them, and struck them.
- Judges 10:2 וְ/שָׁלֹ֖שׁ conj + Adjective Cardinal number fs He judged Israel twenty-three years, and died, and was buried in Shamir.
- Judges 11:26 שְׁלֹ֥שׁ adj Cardinal number fs While Israel lived in Heshbon and its towns, and in Aroer and its towns, and in all the cities that are along by the side of the Arnon, three hundred years; why didn't you recover them within that time?
- Judges 14:14 שְׁלֹ֥שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs He said to them, Out of the eater came forth food, Out of the strong came forth sweetness. They couldn't in three days declare the riddle.
- Judges 15:4 שְׁלֹשׁ adj Cardinal number fs Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between every two tails.
- Judges 15:11 שְׁלֹשֶׁת֩ adj Cardinal number ms cs Then three thousand men of Judah went down to the cleft of the rock of Etam, and said to Samson, "Don't you know that the Philistines are rulers over us? What then is this that you have done to us?" He said to them, As they did to me, so have I done to them.
- Judges 16:15 שָׁלֹ֤שׁ adj Cardinal number fs She said to him, How can you say, I love you, when your heart is not with me? you have mocked me these three times, and have not told me in which your great strength lies.
- Judges 16:27 כִּ/שְׁלֹ֤שֶׁת prep + Adjective Cardinal number ms cs Now the house was full of men and women; and all the lords of the Philistines were there; and there were on the roof about three thousand men and women, who saw while Samson made sport.
- Judges 19:4 שְׁלֹ֣שֶׁת adj Cardinal number ms cs His father-in-law, the young lady's father, retained him; and he abode with him three days: so they ate and drink, and lodged there.
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.
