שממה
desolation
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
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.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H8077 appears in the Book of Jeremiah — 15 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.
Jeremiah
- Jeremiah 4:27 שְׁמָמָ֥ה n c fs For thus says Yahweh, The whole land shall be a desolation; yet will I not make a full end.
- Jeremiah 6:8 שְׁמָמָ֔ה n c fs Be instructed, Jerusalem, lest my soul be alienated from you; lest I make you a desolation, a land not inhabited.
- Jeremiah 9:11 שְׁמָמָ֖ה n c fs I will make Jerusalem heaps, a dwelling-place of jackals; and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation, without inhabitant.
- Jeremiah 10:22 שְׁמָמָ֖ה n c fs The voice of news, behold, it comes, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a dwelling-place of jackals.
- Jeremiah 12:10 שְׁמָמָֽה n c fs Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
- Jeremiah 12:11 לִ/שְׁמָמָ֔ה prep + n c fs They have made it a desolation; it mourns to me, being desolate; the whole land is made desolate, because no man lays it to heart.
- Jeremiah 25:12 לְ/שִֽׁמְמ֥וֹת prep + n c fp cs It shall happen, when seventy years are accomplished, that I will punish the king of Babylon, and that nation, says Yahweh, for their iniquity, and the land of the Chaldeans; and I will make it desolate forever.
- Jeremiah 32:43 שְׁמָמָ֥ה n c fs Fields shall be bought in this land, about which you say, It is desolate, without man or animal; it is given into the hand of the Chaldeans.
- Jeremiah 34:22 שְׁמָמָ֖ה n c fs Behold, I will command, says Yahweh, and cause them to return to this city; and they shall fight against it, and take it, and burn it with fire: and I will make the cities of Judah a desolation, without inhabitant.
- Jeremiah 44:6 לִ/שְׁמָמָ֖ה prep + n c fs Therefore my wrath and my anger was poured forth, and was kindled in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; and they are wasted and desolate, as it is this day.
- Jeremiah 49:2 שְׁמָמָ֔ה n c fs Therefore, behold, the days come, says Yahweh, that I will cause an alarm of war to be heard against Rabbah of the children of Ammon; and it shall become a desolate heap, and her daughters shall be burned with fire: then shall Israel possess those who did possess him, says Yahweh.
- Jeremiah 49:33 שְׁמָמָ֖ה n c fs Hazor shall be a dwelling-place of jackals, a desolation forever: no man shall dwell there, neither shall any son of man sojourn therein.
- Jeremiah 50:13 שְׁמָמָ֖ה n c fs Because of the wrath of Yahweh she shall not be inhabited, but she shall be wholly desolate: everyone who goes by Babylon shall be astonished, and hiss at all her plagues.
- Jeremiah 51:26 שִׁמְמ֥וֹת n c fp cs They shall not take of you a stone for a corner, nor a stone for foundations; but you shall be desolate for ever, says Yahweh.
- Jeremiah 51:62 שִׁמְמ֥וֹת n c fp cs and say, Yahweh, you have spoken concerning this place, to cut it off, that none shall dwell therein, neither man nor animal, but that it shall be desolate forever.
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 שממה centers on the idea of “desolation.” First canonically at Exodus 23:29, it enters the text early. It turns up in 54 verses across 11 books, a moderately common footprint. The word gravitates to Ezekiel (37%), then Jeremiah and Isaiah. Dig into 54-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8077 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 →
- 54
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 54 distinct verses.
- 11 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 11 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #658
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 658 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 54 occurrences in the concordance →
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 54 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 51 verses · 94%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 4%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 2%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Desolate 17×, Desolation 10×, Shall be desolate 8×
- American Standard Version†: Desolation 19×, Desolate 9×, Shall be a desolation 6×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Desolate 24×, Desolation 18×, Wasteland 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Desolation 22×, Desolate 5×, Devastation 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8077 across 57† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8077 across 61† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 19 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 H8077 across 56† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8077 across 51† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- devastation, waste, desolation
Word origin
I. n.f. a devastation, waste;—abs. שׁ׳ Ex 23:29 +; pl. cstr. שִׁמְמוֹת Je 51:26 +;—waste, usually of land, city, houses, etc., Ex 23:29 (E), Is 1:7 (prob. del., with words foll. StuJPTh. 1877, 714 FBJBL (1890), 84), Lv 26:33 (H), Je 4:27 + 14 times Je (‖ מֵאֵין אָדָם וגו׳ 32:43, מֵאֵין ישֵׁב 34:22), Ez 6:14 + 18 times Ez (35:7a read שְׁמָמָה וּמְשַׁמָּה for MT שִֽׁמְמָה וּשְׁמָמָה, so Hi Co Toy Krae al.) +; of prince, יִלְבַּשׁ שׁ׳ Ez 7:27; of idols Mi 1:7; כּוֹס שַׁמָּה וּשׁ׳ Ez 23:33.—Ez 35:12 v. שׁמם Qal.
I. Ez 35:7 v. foregoing.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שמם (shâmêm) (H8076) — desolate.
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.
שְׁמָמָה
- preced. wds.) waste, desolation. M. Kat. 17ᵃ, v. שַׁמְתָּא.—Pl. שְׁמָמוֹת, constr. שִׁמְמוֹת. Cant. R. to III, 4 (ref. to Is. XXI, 1) דרך ש׳ מדבר בא he (Nebuchadnezzar) came by the way of the deserts of the wilderness. Lam. R. introd., end (in an obscure passage) מש׳ הארץ from the deserts of the land. e.g. Isaiah 21:1
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 23 distinct written forms H8077 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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 50 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 54 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
- Exodus 23:29
- Leviticus 26:33
- Joshua 8:28
- Isaiah 1:7
- Jeremiah 4:27
- Ezekiel 6:14
- Daniel 9:18
- Joel 2:3
- Micah 1:7
- Zephaniah 1:13
- Malachi 1:3
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.
