שְׂמָאלִי
left side
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 6 times (67%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (22%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (11%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 9 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8042 appears — 9 distinct verses across 5 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.
Leviticus 4 verses
- Leviticus 14:15 הַ/שְּׂמָאלִֽית ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs The priest shall take some of the log of oil, and pour it into the palm of his own left hand.
- Leviticus 14:16 הַ/שְּׂמָאלִ֑ית ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs The priest shall dip his right finger in the oil that is in his left hand, and shall sprinkle some of the oil with his finger seven times before Yahweh.
- Leviticus 14:26 הַ/שְּׂמָאלִֽית ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs The priest shall pour some of the oil into the palm of his own left hand;
- Leviticus 14:27 הַ/שְּׂמָאלִ֑ית ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs and the priest shall sprinkle with his right finger some of the oil that is in his left hand seven times before Yahweh.
1 Kings 1 verse
2 Kings 1 verse
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 3:17 מֵֽ/הַ/שְּׂמֹ֑אול prep + ptcl def.art + n c ms He set up the pillars before the temple, one on the right hand, and the other on the left; and called the name of that on the right hand Jachin, and the name of that on the left Boaz.
- 2 Chronicles 23:10 הַ/שְּׂמָאלִ֔ית ptcl def.art + Adjective Adjective fs He set all the people, every man with his weapon in his hand, from the right side of the house to the left side of the house, along by the altar and the house, by the king round about.
Ezekiel 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, שמאלי (sᵉmâʼlîy) means “left side.” Scripture first uses it in Leviticus 14:15. Spanning 9 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Leviticus (44% of all occurrences). From the same root come שמאול and שמאל. Dig into 9-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8042 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Leviticus 4 verses 44%
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 22%
- 1 Kings 1 verse 11%
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 9 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 44%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 22%
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: Left 4×, Is in his left 2×, Left hand 2×
- American Standard Version: Left 4×, Is in his left 2×, Left hand 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Left 5×, North 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Left 9×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8042 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8042 across 9 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8042 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8042 across 9 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.
- left, left side, on the left
Word origin
שְׂמָאלִי adj. left, on the left
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שמאול (sᵉmôʼwl) (H8040) — left.
Forms in the corpus
The 5 distinct written forms H8042 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/שְּׂמָאלִ֑ית | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 14:16 | 2 |
| הַ/שְּׂמָאלִ֔י | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Ezekiel 4:4 | 2 |
| הַ/שְּׂמָאלִ֔ית | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 23:10 | 2 |
| הַ/שְּׂמָאלִֽית | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 14:15 | 2 |
| מֵֽ/הַ/שְּׂמֹ֑אול | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 3:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8042, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
