שְׁפַל
low
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8215 appears — 1 distinct verse 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 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, שפל (shᵉphal) means “low.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. The word gravitates to Daniel (100%). Found nowhere else but Daniel 4:17. 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 H8215 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.
- #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
- Daniel 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Basest 1×
- American Standard Version: Lowest 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Lowliest 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Lowliest of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8215 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8215 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8215 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8215 across 2 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.
- low, lowliest (of station)
Word origin
שְׁפַל adj. low in station;—cstr. Dn 4:14.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שפל (shᵉphal) (H8214) — 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.
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.
