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שָׁסַף

to hew

‘to hew’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H8158 Strong's Hebrew
shâçaph Transliteration
/shaw-saf'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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.

“to hew” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb שסף (shâçaph). A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in 1 Samuel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at 1 Samuel 15:33. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
hew in pieces
Modern gloss
to hew
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H8158 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
1 Samuel 15:33
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in 1 Samuel 15:33.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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 1 distinct verse.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Hewed 1×, Pieces 1×
  • American Standard Version: Hewed 1×, Pieces 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Pieces 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Hacked 1×, Pieces 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H8158 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Hewed” 1×
  • “Pieces” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H8158 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Hewed” 1×
  • “Pieces” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H8158 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Pieces” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H8158 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “And” 1×
  • “Hacked” 1×
  • “Pieces” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 2 senses 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.

  1. (Piel) to hew in pieces, cut in pieces
  2. meaning dubious

Word origin

[ שָׁסַף ] vb. dub.: Pi. hew in pieces;— 1 S 15:33

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Origin: a primitive root

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 2428


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.

שָׁסַף

  • (b. h.), Pi. שִׁסֵּף (cmp. preced.) to split, to hew in pieces. Lam. R. to III, 64 (ref. to וישסף, I Sam. XV, 33) שחתכו וכ׳ he cut him in four pieces. Sifra Thazriʿa Par. 5, ch. XVI יְשַׁסְּפֶנּוּ Rabad, v. שָׁצַף. e.g. 1 Samuel 15:33

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.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

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