שֹׁ֫עַל
handful
also: hollow hand, hollow of hand fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (33%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (33%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8168 appears — 3 distinct verses across 3 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.
1 Kings 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
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.
The Hebrew noun שעל centers on the idea of “handful.” It is rare — just 3 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to 1 Kings (33%), then Isaiah and Ezekiel. Debuting at 1 Kings 20:10, it then recurs through the corpus. BDB distinguishes 3 senses; alongside “handful” it spans “hollow hand” and “hollow of hand”. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8168 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 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 3 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 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: Handfuls 2×
- American Standard Version: Handfuls 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Handful 1×, Handfuls 1×, Hollow of his hand 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Handfuls 1×, Handfuls of 1×, Palm 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8168 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 H8168 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 H8168 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8168 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 3 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.
- hollow hand, hollow of hand, handful
- hollow hand, hollow of hand
- handful
Word origin
[ שֹׁ֫עַל ] n.[m.] hollow hand, handful
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to hollow out
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.
עֹל
- , v. עוֹל
עַל
- height; (prepos.) upon, above; about &c.—With suff. (pl.) עָלַי, עָלֶיךָ &c. Ab. I, 2 על שלשה וכ׳ the world stands on three things. Sabb. II, 6 על שלש וכ׳ for three sins &c. Snh. 20ᵃ, a. fr. אמרו עָלָיו על וכ׳ they relate about &c. Nidd. 23ᵇ מי שלבו דוה עליו whose heart within him &c., v. דָּוָה; a. v. fr.—על יד, על ידי, v. יָד; על מנת, v. מְנָת, &c.—Ab. Zar. 30ᵃ, a. e. עָלי ועל צוארי, v. צַוָּאר.
עַל ²
- Targ. Gen. I, 2; a. v. fr.—With suffix (pl.) עֲלַי, עֲלָךְ, עֲלוֹהִי &c. Ib. XXVII, 12; a. v. fr.—Ab. II, 6 על דאטפת, v. טוּף.—ייתי עֲלַי, v. אֲתָא; a. v. fr.
עָל
- verb, v. עוּל, עֲלַל.
*עָל
- (cmp. עִילָא II) plan. Pesik. Vattom., p. 133ᵃ (ref. to Is. V, 19) [read:] ונדע על דמאן היא קיימא על דידן וכ׳ and let us know, whose plan will stand (be executed), our plan or his plan. Ib. הא קמת על דידהון על דידי לא קמת (not היא) now their plan stands, shall mine not stand?; Yalk. Lam. 1033; 1034. e.g. Isaiah 5:19
עֵל
- , v. עֵיל
שֹׁעַל
- (b. h.)
- 1. hollow of the hand, palm, handful. Tanḥ. B’resh. 5 (ref. to Is. XL, 12) מן שָׁעֳלוֹ אתה יודע וכ׳ by the size of his handful canst thou know who he himself is; ib. Ḥayé 3 וכל … בשעלו all the seas and rivers did he measure with his palm; ib. Emor 15 וכל … מלא שעלו וכ׳ all the waters of the world fill the palm of the Lord; Pesik. Eth Korb., p. 57ᵇ מלא שׁוֹעֳלוֹ; Tanḥ. Pinḥ. 12 מלא שָׁעֳלִי my handful; Num. R. s. 2117; Pesik. R. addit. s. 1 כל … לתוך שעלי all the waters of creation did I compress into my palm.—Pl. שָׁעֲלִים. Ib. גבור … פחות מעשרה ש׳ a mighty man … drinks no less than ten handfuls; a. e.—2) ש׳ של ים the hollow of the sea, depth. Cant. R. to II, 15 (ref. to Cant. l. c.; v. ed. Baer et Del. Notae criticae a. l.) קדמאה מלא … שירדו לשעלו של ים the first shuʿalim is written plene, the second defective, which may be read שָׁעֳלִים; they (the Egyptians) were the foxes that went down to the bottom of the sea; Ex. R. s. 22 על שם שעלו של ים an allusion to the bottom of the sea; Yalk. Ps. 786 שעלים (read: שעל ים). e.g. Isaiah 40:12
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 H8168 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/שַׁעֲלֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 13:19 | 1 |
| בְּ/שָׁעֳל֜/וֹ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Isaiah 40:12 | 1 |
| לִ/שְׁעָלִ֕ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 20:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8168, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
