שִׁפְלוּת
idleness
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
- 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 H8220 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.
Ecclesiastes 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.
שפלות (shiphlûwth) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “idleness.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. It clusters heavily in Ecclesiastes, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Its lone occurrence is Ecclesiastes 10:18. From the same root come שפל, שפל and שפל. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8220 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
- Ecclesiastes 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: Through idleness 1×
- American Standard Version: In 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Idle 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Idleness of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8220 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8220 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8220 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8220 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- sinking, idleness, inactivity
Word origin
שִׁפְלוּת n.f. sinking;—cstr. Ec 10:18
— 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.
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
שִׁפְלוּת
- (preced. wds.)
- 1. (b. h.) ידים lassitude, v. שָׁפֵל I. I.
- 2. humility, humiliation. Num. R. s. 420 אם לפני … צריך אדם לנהוג ש׳ בעצמו וכ׳ if a man must conduct himself humbly before a king of flesh and blood, how much more must he do so before the Lord? Ib. end היה נוהג בש׳ וכ׳ he lived humbly before the Lord. Sot. 48ᵃ bot. (ref. to Is. V, 15) שגורמין ש׳ לשונאיו של הקב"ה (not לשונאי) they cause humiliation to the enemies of the Lord (euphem. for: to God); ש׳ של ישראל the humiliation of Israel; a. e. e.g. Isaiah 5:15
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8220, 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
- שפלה shᵉphêlâh H8219 valley
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 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.
