שִׁלְטוֹן
mastery
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H7983 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Ecclesiastes 2 verses
- Ecclesiastes 8:4 שִׁלְט֑וֹן n c ms for the king's word is supreme. Who can say to him, "What are you doing?"
- Ecclesiastes 8:8 שִׁלְטוֹן֙ n c ms There is no man who has power over the spirit to contain the spirit; neither does he have power over the day of death. There is no discharge in war; neither shall wickedness deliver those who practice it.
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, שלטון (shilṭôwn) means “mastery.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. Its uses cluster heavily in Ecclesiastes (100% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Ecclesiastes 8:4. Sharing its root, it stands alongside שלט, שלט and שלט. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7983 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.
- #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
- Ecclesiastes 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Hath he power 1×, Is there is power 1×
- American Standard Version: Hath he power 1×, Hath power 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Has authority 1×, Is supreme 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Authority 1×, Is authoritative 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7983 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7983 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7983 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7983 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- mastery
Word origin
n.[m.] mastery (LagBN 199);—Ec 8:4, 8 (c. בְּ).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שלט (shâlaṭ) (H7980) — to dominate.
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.
שִׁלְטוֹן
- preced. wds.)
- 1. rulership. Sifré Deut. 321; Yalk. ib. 945 שִׁלְטוֹנָן, v. עֶכֶן.
- 2. (sub. בעל) ruler, governor. Sifra B’ḥuck. Par. 1, ch. III ש׳ אחד בא … זה שׁוּלְטָן וכ׳ one governor comes and subjugates (Israel), and goes away, and another governor comes &c. Tanḥ. Vayera 19 (ref. to Koh. VIII, 4) ש׳ הוא ואין וכ׳ God is the ruler, and none can protest against him. Y. Ber. VIII, 12ᵃ top מלך יוצא וש׳ נכנס וכ׳ when the king goes out, and the governor comes in, they escort the king first, and then they lead the governor in (the benediction for the exit of the Sabbath must precede that for the entrance of the Holy Day). Y. Sot. IX, 24ᵇ top; Tosef. ib. XV, 7. Y. Kidd. III, 64ᵇ top במה שאדבר עליך לש׳ (be betrothed unto me) for the consideration that I shall speak to the governor in thy behalf; a. fr.—Pl. שִׁלְטוֹנִים, שִלְטוֹנִין, שִׁי׳. Gen. R. s. 82 עד היכן היו מלכיות וש׳ רוצים וכ׳ how anxious courts and governors were to be connected with him (v. שׁוּלְטָנוּת). Ib. הוא היה … הש׳ he (Lotan) was one of the governors (ref. to אלוף, Gen. XXXVI, 29); a. fr.—[Gen. R. s. 93 שני שי׳ זולגות דם, read with Yalk. Job 897: עינו של ימין זולגת דם.]—Fem. שִׁלְטוֹנִית, שִׁי׳; pl. שִׁלְטוֹנִיּוֹת, שִׁי׳. Pesik. R. s. 42 שהיו השילטונים והש׳ מחסדים וכ׳ (or מחסדות, not מחסר׳) the governors and their wives insulted Sarah &c.—[Gen. R. s. 82 שלטוניות, ed. Wil., v. שׁוּלְטָנוּת.] e.g. Ecclesiastes 8:4
שִׁלְטוֹן ²
- Targ. O. Gen. XLIX, 9. Targ. Mic. VI, 9; a. fr.—Pl. שִׁלְטוֹנִין, שִׁלְטוֹנַיָּא, שִׁי׳. Targ. Is. VII, 20. Ib. XIV, 8. Targ. Ez. XXIX, 4; 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 2 distinct written forms H7983 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שִׁלְט֑וֹן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 8:4 | 1 |
| שִׁלְטוֹן֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 8:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7983, 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
- שלט shᵉlêṭ H7981 to rule
- שלט sheleṭ H7982 shield
- שלטת shalleṭeth H7986 domineering
- שליט shallîyṭ H7989 ruler
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 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.
