שִׁקְמָה
sycamore
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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
- 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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 6 times (86%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 1 time (14%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8256 appears — 7 distinct verses across 6 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.
1 Kings 1 verse
1 Chronicles 1 verse
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 1:15 כַּ/שִּׁקְמִ֥ים prep det + n c fp The king made silver and gold to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the lowland, for abundance.
- 2 Chronicles 9:27 כַּ/שִּׁקְמִ֥ים prep det + n c fp The king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycamore trees that are in the lowland, for abundance.
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Amos 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.
The Hebrew noun שקמה centers on the idea of “sycamore.” Debuting at 1 Kings 10:27, it then recurs through the corpus. It appears 7 verses across 6 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to 2 Chronicles (29%), then 1 Kings and 1 Chronicles. It shares a root with συκαμινος. 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 H8256 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 29%
- 1 Kings 1 verse 14%
- 1 Chronicles 1 verse 14%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
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: He as the sycomore trees 2×, Sycomore trees 2×
- American Standard Version: He to be as the sycomore-trees 3×, Sycomore-trees 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sycamore 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sycamore trees 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8256 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8256 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8256 across 7 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8256 across 7 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 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.
- sycamore tree (bearing figs)
Word origin
[ שִׁקְמָה ] n.f. sycomore tree
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of uncertain derivation
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.
קָמָה
- standing corn. Peah VI, 8 הק׳ מצלת וכ׳ standing corn saves the sheaf (in the field from being considered a forgotten sheaf belonging to the poor); איזוהי ק׳ שהיא וכ׳ how much standing corn must there be to save the sheaf? Y. ib. VI, 19ᵈ top עומר שסביבותיו ק׳ a sheaf surrounded by standing corn. B. Kam. 60ᵃ (ref. to Ex. XXII, 5) ק׳ למה לי כל בעלי קימה what is ḳamah to intimate? It is to include all things of erect stature (as trees, living beings &c., Rashi). Y. ib. VI, beg. 5ᵇ; a. fr.—Pesik. R. s. 43 (play on מלל, Gen. XXI, 7) קָמָתוֹ … ונעשה מלילות the standing crop of Abraham was dried up, but it became again full of ears (his virile strength was restored); Gen. R. s. 53 קומתו (corr. acc.).—Pl. constr. קָמֵי halms, stalks; ק׳ שפה the stiff cords in the border (around the neck) of a garment. M. Kat. 22ᵇ מבדיל ק׳ ש׳ (in rending a garment in mourning) one must (may) sever the stiff border around the neck; (Y. ib. III, 83ᵈ top קנה שפה). Hor. 12ᵇ למטה מק׳ ש׳ beneath the border (leaving the border uncut); למעלה מק׳ ש׳ he rends from over the border (all through); (Y. M. Kat. l. c. קנה ש׳). e.g. Exodus 22:5
קָמָה ²
- ch., v. קָמָא II
שִׁקְמָה
- (b. h.) sycamore. B. Bath. II, 11 בחרוב ובש׳ חמשים אמה when planting a carob tree or a sycamore, (you must keep off from your neighbor’s well) by fifty cubits. Pes. 53ᵃ, v. שְׁפֵלָה; (Tosef. Shebi. VII, 11 pl.). Nidd. 8ᵇ, a. e. בתולת ש׳, v. בְּתוּלָה. Gen. R. s. 12 (ref. to Is. LXV, 22) כש׳ הזו שהיא וכ׳ like the sycamore that remains in the ground six hundred years; (Pesik. R. s. 1 עץ הסדן); a. fr.—ש׳(של) סדן, v. סַדָּן.—בנות ש׳, v. בַּת I.—Pl. שִׁקְמִים, שִׁקְמִין. Tosef. Shebi. VII, 11, v. supra; Y. ib. IX, 38ᵈ bot.; a. e. e.g. Isaiah 65:22
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 5 distinct written forms H8256 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| כַּ/שִּׁקְמִ֥ים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 10:27 | 3 |
| וְ/הַ/שִּׁקְמִים֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Chronicles 27:28 | 1 |
| וְ֝/שִׁקְמוֹתָ֗/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 78:47 | 1 |
| שִׁקְמִ֣ים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 9:10 | 1 |
| שִׁקְמִֽים | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Amos 7:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8256, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
