שַׁרְשְׁרָה
chain
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 5 times (71%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 2 times (29%)
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 H8333 appears — 5 distinct verses across 3 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.
Exodus 2 verses
- Exodus 28:14 שַׁרְשְׁרֹת֙ שַׁרְשְׁרֹ֥ת n c fp cs n c fp and two chains of pure gold; you make them like cords shall, of braided work: and you shall put the braided chains on the settings.
- Exodus 39:15 שַׁרְשְׁרֹ֥ת n c fp cs They made on the breastplate chains like cords, of braided work of pure gold.
1 Kings 1 verse
2 Chronicles 2 verses
- 2 Chronicles 3:5 וְ/שַׁרְשְׁרֽוֹת conj + n c fp The greater house he made a ceiling with fir-wood, which he overlaid with fine gold, and worked thereon palm trees and chains.
- 2 Chronicles 3:16 שַׁרְשְׁרוֹת֙ בַּֽ/שַּׁרְשְׁרֽוֹת n c fp prep det + n c fp He made chains in the oracle, and put [them] on the tops of the pillars; and he made one hundred pomegranates, and put them on the chains.
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.
“chain” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun שרשרה (sharshᵉrâh). The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. More than a third of its appearances fall in Exodus. First canonically at Exodus 28:14, it enters the text early. It shares a root with שרש, שרש and שרשה. See the sense tree, 5-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8333 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 2 verses 40%
- 2 Chronicles 2 verses 40%
- 1 Kings 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 40%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 20%
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: Chains 6×
- American Standard Version: Chains 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Chains 4×, Chainwork 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Chains 5×, Chains of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8333 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8333 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 H8333 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8333 across 7 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.
- chain
Word origin
[ שַׁרְשְׁרָה ] n.f. (in spite of foll. sf. masc.) chain
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שרש (shârash) (H8327) — to uproot.
Forms in the corpus
The 6 distinct written forms H8333 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שַׁרְשְׁרֹ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 28:14 | 2 |
| בַּֽ/שַּׁרְשְׁרֽוֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 3:16 | 1 |
| וְ/שַׁרְשְׁרֽוֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 3:5 | 1 |
| שַׁרְשְׁר֔וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 7:17 | 1 |
| שַׁרְשְׁרֹת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Exodus 28:14 | 1 |
| שַׁרְשְׁרוֹת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 3:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8333, 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
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
