שְׁפֵלָה
valley
‘valley’ 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
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8219 appears in the Book of 1 Kings — 1 distinct verse. 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
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 שפלה centers on the idea of “valley.” Where the King James Version says “valley,” newer translations reach for “foothills” (Berean Standard Bible) and “lowland” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 19 verses — uncommon. Joshua dominates its distribution — 6 of 19 verses. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. 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 H8219 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 →
- 19
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 19 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,513
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,513 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 19 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Joshua 6 verses 32%
- 2 Chronicles 4 verses 21%
- Jeremiah 3 verses 16%
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 19 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 13 verses · 68%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 26%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 5%
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: Valley 6×, Vale 3×, Are in the vale 2×
- American Standard Version: Lowland 14×, Are in the lowland 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Foothills 20×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lowland 6×, Shephelah 4×, Lowlands 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8219 across 20 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8219 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H8219 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8219 across 18 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 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.
- lowland, valley
- lowland
Word origin
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.
שְׁפֵלָה
- preced. wds.) lowland. Shebi. IX, 2 וביהודה ההר הש׳ וכ׳ in Judæa, (the three districts are) the highland, the lowland, and the valley; ושְׁפֵלַת לוד כשפלת הדרום and the lowland of Lydda is (with reference to Sabbatical year laws) like the lowland of Darom (South). Tosef. ib. VII, 10; Y. ib. IX, 38ᵈ bot. שָׁפֵל ושְׁפֵלָתוֹ (not שפלה), v. עֵמֶק. Ib. מאמאוס עד לוד ש׳ from Emmaus to Lydda is the plain (of Judæa). Ib. לש׳ וכ׳ (סימן) the presence of sycamores indicates lowland; Pes. 53ᵃ; a. fr.
שְׁפָלָה
- , v. שָׁפָל
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 16 distinct written forms H8219 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8219, 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 shᵉphal H8214 to humble
- שפל shephel H8216 lowliness
- שפל shâphâl H8217 humble
- שפלות shiphlûwth H8220 idleness
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 18 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 19 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
- Deuteronomy 1:7
- Joshua 9:1
- Judges 1:9
- 1 Kings 10:27
- 1 Chronicles 27:28
- 2 Chronicles 1:15
- Jeremiah 17:26
- Obadiah 1:19
- Zechariah 7:7
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.
