שַׁעֲשֻׁעִים
delight
‘delight’ is one of 3 main senses 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
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 7 times (78%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (22%)
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 H8191 appears — 9 distinct verses across 4 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.
Psalms 5 verses
- Psalms 119:24 שַׁעֲשֻׁעָ֗/י n c mp cs + sfx pers 1cs Indeed your statutes are my delight, And my counselors.
- Psalms 119:77 שַֽׁעֲשֻׁעָֽ/י n c mp cs + sfx pers 1cs Let your tender mercies come to me, that I may live; For your law is my delight.
- Psalms 119:92 שַׁעֲשֻׁעָ֑/י n c mp cs + sfx pers 1cs Unless your law had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction.
- Psalms 119:143 שַׁעֲשֻׁעָֽ/י n c mp cs + sfx pers 1cs Trouble and anguish have taken hold of me. Your commandments are my delight.
- Psalms 119:174 שַׁעֲשֻׁעָֽ/י n c mp cs + sfx pers 1cs I have longed for your salvation, Yahweh. Your law is my delight.
Proverbs 2 verses
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 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, שעשע (shaʻshuaʻ) means “delight.” Its uses cluster heavily in Psalms (56% of all occurrences). With 9 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at Psalms 119:24, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 3 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. 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 H8191 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.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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 →
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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 78%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Is my delight 2×
- American Standard Version: Delight 2×, Is my delight 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Delight 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Delight 3×, Is my delight 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8191 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8191 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H8191 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8191 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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.
- delight, enjoyment
- delight
- object of delight
Word origin
-שׁוּעִים n.[m.]pl. intens. delight (BaNB 206);—abs. -שׁוּעִים Je 31:20 Pr 8:30; sf. -שׁוּעָיו Is 5:7, usually -שֻׁעַי Pr 8:31 ψ 119:24, -שֻׁעָ֑י v 77 + 3 times;—delight, in phr. נְטַע שׁ׳ Is 5:7 the planting of his delight (in which he took delight), so יֶלֶד שׁ׳ Je 31:20 (‖ בֵּן יַקִּיר); שׁ׳ אֶת־ Pr 8:31 my delight (was) with the sons of men; elsewhere = object of delight, of wisdom v 30; God’s law, etc., ψ 119:24, 77, 92, 143, 174.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שעע (shâʻaʻ) (H8173) — to blind.
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.
שָׁעַע
- to smooth, paste.
- 1. to smooth, paste over. Y. Kil. I, 27ᵃ top מְשׁעֲשֶׁעֶת את הלב, v. שְׁעוּעִית.
- 2. to appease, console. Pesik. Naḥămu, p. 126ᵇ ומְשַׁעְשְׁעָהּ בזו, v. פִּיד; ib. ושִׁיעְשְׁעָהּ במצרים consoled her (Assyria) with Egypt; ib. ושיעשעה באשור (not לאשור); Yalk. Job 918; Pesik. R. s. 33 ואם הביא עליהם שבר הוא מְשַׁעֲשֵׁעַ וכ׳ when he brings misfortune upon them, he consoles them one with the other.
- 1. to be appeased, enjoy one’s self. Ex. R. s. 5 (ref. to ישעו, Ex. V, 9) שהיו בידן … מִשְׁתַּעְשְׁעִין בהן וכ׳ they had scrolls with them, in reading which they consoled themselves from Sabbath to Sabbath; אל יהו משתעשעין וכ׳ they shall not enjoy themselves, and they shall not rest on the Sabbath; Tanḥ. Vaëra 6; a. e. e.g. Exodus 5:9
- 2. to be a pleasure. Tanḥ. T’tsavveh 1 (ref. to Jer. XXXI, 19) מהו ילד שעשועים … ומִשְׁתַּעְשֵׁעַ לאביו what is ‘a child of delight’? Three or four years old, when it begins to talk and becomes a pleasure to his father. e.g. Jeremiah 31:19
שִׁעֲשֵׁעַ
- , v. שָׁעַע, שְׁעַע.
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 8 distinct written forms H8191 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שַׁעֲשֻׁעָֽ/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 119:143 | 2 |
| וְ֝/שַׁעֲשֻׁעַ֗/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Proverbs 8:31 | 1 |
| שַׁ֭עֲשֻׁעִים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Proverbs 8:30 | 1 |
| שַֽׁעֲשֻׁעָֽ/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 119:77 | 1 |
| שַׁעֲשֻׁעִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 31:20 | 1 |
| שַׁעֲשֻׁעָ֑/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 119:92 | 1 |
| שַׁעֲשֻׁעָ֗/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 119:24 | 1 |
| שַׁעֲשׁוּעָ֑י/ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 5:7 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 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.
