אֵ֫שֶׁל
tamarisk tree
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 H815 appears — 3 distinct verses across 2 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.
Genesis 1 verse
1 Samuel 2 verses
- 1 Samuel 22:6 הָ/אֶ֤שֶׁל ptcl def.art + n c ms Saul heard that David was discovered, and the men who were with him: now Saul was sitting in Gibeah, under the tamarisk tree in Ramah, with his spear in his hand, and all his servants were standing about him.
- 1 Samuel 31:13 הָ/אֶ֖שֶׁל ptcl def.art + n c ms They took their bones, and buried them under the tamarisk tree in Jabesh, and fasted seven days.
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, אשל (ʼêshel) means “tamarisk tree.” It occurs a mere 3 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to 1 Samuel (67%), then Genesis. Scripture first uses it in Genesis 21:33. 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 H815 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 →
- 3
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 3 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 3 occurrences in the concordance →
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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 33%
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: Under a tree 2×
- American Standard Version: Under the tamarisk-tree 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Tamarisk tree 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tamarisk tree 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H815 across 3 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 H815 across 3 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 H815 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H815 across 3 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.
- tamarisk tree
Word origin
n.m. tamarisk-tree (Arabic أَثْلٌ Sab. אתֿל Sab.Denkm.65 cf. DHMBS ii. 958; on an Aramaic אַתְלָא v. LöwNo. 38; cf. TristrFFP 250) planted by Abraham Gn 21:33 (J); in 1 S 22:6 Saul is dwelling בַּגִּבְעָה תַּחַת־הָאֵשֶׁל בָּרָמָה; 31:13 Saul and his sons are buried תַּחַת־הָא׳; it was perhaps a sacred tree, marking shrine.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from a root of uncertain signification
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.
אֵשֶׁל
- אשל to be firmly rooted,, v. אשש; v. Ges. H. Dict. s. v.)
- 1. tamarisk, symbol of strength and eminence.—Pl. אֲשָׁלִים, const. אֶשְׁלֵי. Y. B. Mets. I, end, 8ᵃ א׳ דיינין וכ׳ the eminent (old) among the Babylonian scholars are but like the pidgeons (the young) among the Palestinean; cmp. Y. Ned. VI, 40ᵃ bot.
- 2. plantation, pleasure-garden, tent. Sot. 10ᵃ; Gen. R. s. 54 end (ref. to Gen. XXI, 33, v. Targ. a. l.).— e.g. Genesis 21:33
- *3. pr. n. Eshel, a river in Assyria. Snh. 92ᵇ. Yalk. Ezek. 376 אשור).
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 3 distinct written forms H815 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֶ֖שֶׁל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Genesis 21:33 | 1 |
| הָ/אֶ֖שֶׁל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 31:13 | 1 |
| הָ/אֶ֤שֶׁל | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 22:6 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 3 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 3 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.
