שְׁפֵל
to humble
‘to humble’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Construct 1 time (25%)
- Verb, a, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8214 appears — 4 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Daniel 4 verses
- Daniel 4:37 לְ/הַשְׁפָּלָֽה prep + Hiphil inf.cs Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and extol and honor the King of heaven; for all his works are truth, and his ways justice; and those who walk in pride he is able to abase.
- Daniel 5:19 מַשְׁפִּֽיל a ptcp.act ms and because of the greatness that he gave him, all the peoples, nations, and languages trembled and feared before him: whom he would he killed, and whom he would he kept alive; and whom he would he raised up, and whom he would he put down.
- Daniel 5:22 הַשְׁפֵּ֖לְתְּ Hiphil pf 2ms You his son, Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, though you knew all this,
- Daniel 7:24 יְהַשְׁפִּֽל Hiphil impf 3ms As for the ten horns, out of this kingdom shall ten kings arise: and another shall arise after them; and he shall be diverse from the former, and he shall put down three kings.
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, שפל (shᵉphal) means “to humble.” It is rare — just 4 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Daniel (100%). Scripture first uses it in Daniel 4:37. Ranging over 2 senses, it is not a single-sense word. 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 H8214 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 4 verses 100%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 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: Abase 1×, He shall subdue 1×, Humbled 1×
- American Standard Version: Abase 1×, He shall put down 1×, Humbled 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Humbled 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Have 1×, He humbled 1×, He will put down 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8214 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8214 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8214 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H8214 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- to be or bring low, humble
- (Aphel) to bring low, humble
Word origin
[ שְׁפֵל ] vb. be low
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שפל (shâphêl) (H8213) — to humble.
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.
שָׁפֵל I
- to be low.
- to lower, humble. Erub. 13ᵇ המַשְׁפִּיל עצמו; הקב"ה מַשְׁפִּילוֹ, v. גָּבַהּ; Ned. 55ᵃ. Pesik. R. s. 10 (ref. to Is. II, 9) אימתי שחו ונִשְׁפָּלוּ … הִשְׁפִּילָם הקב"ה when did they sink and were lowered? When they committed that deed (worshipped the golden calf), the Lord lowered them. Arakh. 15ᵇ יַשְׁפִּיל דעתו let him humble his mind (think of his shortcomings). M. Kat. 16ᵇ (play on ת̇ח̇כ̇מ̇נ̇י̇, II Sam. XXIII, 8) הואיל והִשְׁפַּלְתָּ עצמך ת̇ה̇א כ̇מ̇ו̇נ̇י̇ because thou didst lower thyself, thou shalt be like myself; a. fr. e.g. Isaiah 2:9
- to be lowered. Pesik. R. l. c., v. supra.
- same. Pesik. Ki Thissa, p. 11ᵇ (ref. to Is. II, 9) יודע … והָשְׁפַּלְתִּי אני והם וכ׳ I know that Israel bowed to the golden calf, and I and they have been lowered, but wilt thou not raise (forgive) them?; Tanḥ. Ki Thissa 4 והשפלתי אותי and I myself have been lowered; Yalk. Is. 260 והוּשְׁפַּלְתִּי. Tanḥ. l. c. 5 (ref. to Ps. LXXV, 8) בלשון זה הו׳ וכ׳ for the word zeh (Ex. XXXII, 24) was he (Aaron) lowered, v. גָּבַהּ; בלשון זה הוּשְׁפָּלוּ וכ׳ through zeh (ib. 23) were they lowered, and with zeh (ib. XXX, 13) have they been raised; Lev. R. s. 8; a. fr. e.g. Isaiah 2:9
- [to let one’s self drop,]
- 1. to be humble, gentle. Lev. R. s. 19 (ref. to שפלות ידים, Koh. X, 18) ע"י שנִשְׁתַּפְּלוּ ישראל מלחנות וכ׳ because the Israelites were too gentle to encamp (before Sinai) in discord &c. e.g. Ecclesiastes 10:18
- 2. to be lazy, indolent. Ib. ע"י … מִשְׁתַּפֵּל מלקנח וכ׳ (not לקנח) because that man is too careless to wipe his body properly, he gets scabs. Ib. ע"י … מִשְׁתַּפֶּלֶת וכ׳ because that woman is too indolent to examine her body properly &c.; a. e.
שְׁפַל
- , to fall down, go down. B. Kam. 92ᵇ; Meg. 14ᵇ (prov.) שפיל ואזיל בר אווזא וכ׳ the duck bends its head down in walking, and its eyes look all around (it follows two pursuits at the same time, v. פִּלְכָא). Snh. 7ᵃ ודיקולא שָׁפֵיל, v. דִּיקוּלָא. Ber. 10ᵃ שְׁפִיל לסיפיה דקרא go to the end of the verse (in order to understand the whole of it); a. fr.
- 1. to lower. Targ. Y. II, Lev. X, 20. Targ. Prov. XXV, 7. Ib. XXIX, 23; a. fr.
- 2. to carry down, carry along. Yeb. 121ᵃ גלי אַשְׁפְּלוּ the waves may have carried (and landed him).
- to humble one’s self. Targ. I Sam. II, 36.
שָׁפָל
- preced.)
- 1. low, humble. Num. R. s. 420 ואל … ש׳ בעיני וכ׳ say not that I was low in the eyes of others, and was not despised in my own eyes. Taan. 16ᵃ; Snh. 88ᵇ, a. e. שְׁפַל ברך low of knee, polite. Y. ib. I, 19ᶜ נפש ש׳ a humble soul, humility; Ab. V, 19 נפש ש׳ contented, opp. רחבה. Ib. IV, 10 הוי שְׁ׳ רוח בפני וכ׳ be humble before every man. Snh. 43ᵇ מי שדעתו ש׳ מעלה וכ׳ to him whose mind is lowly the Lord accounts it as if he had offered all kinds of sacrifices. Sot. 5ᵃ ואין … את הש׳, v. גָּבוֹהַּ. Ib. אבל … ורואה את הש׳ but not so the Lord, he is high and looks at the low; a. fr.—Pl. שְׁפָלִים, שְׁפָלִין; שְׁפָלוֹת. Ib. 47ᵇ, v. גָּבַהּ; a. e.
- 2. (v. שָׁפֵל, Hithpa.) [letting the hands sink,] indolent, negligent, opp. זָרִיז. Tosef. Yeb. IV, 8; Pes. 50ᵇ יש ש׳ וכ׳ sometimes one is lazy and profits, and sometimes one is lazy and loses.—Pl. as ab. Ib. 89ᵃ; Ned. 36ᵃ; Gitt. 25ᵃ
שְׁפַל II
- , lowly. Targ. Prov. XVI, 19.
שָׁפֵל
- II (or שׁפֶל) m., v. next w.
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 4 distinct written forms H8214 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַשְׁפֵּ֖לְתְּ | Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Daniel 5:22 | 1 |
| יְהַשְׁפִּֽל | Verb, Hiphil, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Daniel 7:24 | 1 |
| לְ/הַשְׁפָּלָֽה | Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Construct | Daniel 4:37 | 1 |
| מַשְׁפִּֽיל | Verb, a, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 5:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8214, 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.
Derives from
Shares the same root
- שפל shephel H8216 lowliness
- שפל shâphâl H8217 humble
- שפלה shᵉphêlâh H8219 valley
- שפלות shiphlûwth H8220 idleness
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
