שָׂשׂוֹן
gladness
also: joy, exultation, rejoicing fuller range ↓
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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8342 appears in the Book of Psalms — 5 distinct verses. 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.
Psalms
- Psalms 45:7 שָׂשׂ֗וֹן n c ms You have loved righteousness, and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has anointed you with the oil of gladness above your fellows.
- Psalms 51:8 שָׂשׂ֣וֹן n c ms Let me hear joy and gladness, That the bones which you have broken may rejoice.
- Psalms 51:12 שְׂשׂ֣וֹן n c ms cs Restore to me the joy of your salvation. Uphold me with a willing spirit.
- Psalms 105:43 בְ/שָׂשׂ֑וֹן prep + n c ms He brought forth his people with joy, His chosen with singing.
- Psalms 119:111 שְׂשׂ֖וֹן n c ms cs I have taken your testimonies as a heritage forever, For they are the joy of my heart.
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.
“gladness” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun ששון (sâsôwn). First canonically at Esther 8:16, it enters the text early. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 22 verses — uncommon. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. Not a single-sense word, it carries 2 senses, among them “joy”, “exultation”, and “rejoicing”. See the sense tree, 22-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8342 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 →
- 22
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 22 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,412
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,412 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 22 occurrences in the concordance →
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 22 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 68%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 32%
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: Joy 11×, Gladness 4×, Mirth 3×
- American Standard Version: Joy 11×, Gladness 3×, Mirth 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Joy 15×, Gladness 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Joy 12×, Gladness 2×, Joy of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8342 across 22 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8342 across 22 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8342 across 22 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 H8342 across 19 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.
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.
- gladness, joy, exultation, rejoicing
- exultation, joy
Word origin
n.m. Is 51:3 exultation, rejoicing;—abs. שׂ׳ ψ 45:8 +, שָׂשׂן Est 8:16; cstr. שְׂשׂוֹן (Sta § 296 e) ψ 51:14; 119:111;—exultation, joy (especially in י׳’s favour), Jo 1:12; Is 12:3 ψ 51:14; 105:43; 119:111; שֶׁמֶן שׂ׳ (i.e. with which guests were anointed; fig.) ψ 45:8; Is 61:3 (opp. אֵבֶל); שֵׁם שׂ׳ Je 33:9 (‖ תְּהִלָּה; on text v. Gie AlbrZAW xvi (1896), 115); elsewhere ‖ שִׂמְחָה: Je 7:34; 15:16; 16:9; 25:10; 33:11; Is 22:13 (only here condemned as reckless, wanton), 35:10; 51:3, 11 Zc 8:19 ψ 51:10; Est 8:16, 17; ‖ שָׂמַח Je 31:13 (opp. אֵבֶל).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שוש (sûws) (H7797) — to rejoice.
Forms in the corpus
The 15 distinct written forms H8342 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 H8342, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 20 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 22 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.
