שֵׁשַׁךְ
Sheshach
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Sheshach’ fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H8347 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 25:26 שֵׁשַׁ֖ךְ n Proper and all the kings of the north, far and near, one with another; and all the kingdoms of the world, which are on the surface of the earth: and the king of Sheshach shall drink after them.
- Jeremiah 51:41 שֵׁשַׁ֔ךְ n Proper How is Sheshach taken! and the praise of the whole earth seized! how is Babylon become a desolation among the nations!
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.
ששך — transliterated Shêshak — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Sheshach.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in Jeremiah (100% of all occurrences). Its earliest occurrence is Jeremiah 25:26. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8347 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 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: How is sheshach 1×, Sheshach 1×
- American Standard Version: How is sheshach 1×, Sheshach 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Sheshach 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Sheshach 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8347 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8347 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8347 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8347 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- Sheshach = "thy fine linen"
- another name for Babylon apparently taken from the goddess 'Shach'
Word origin
n.pr. terr. = בָּבֶל (Jer Rabb. and mod.; by Atbaš (את׳בש׳) v. improb.), late Bab. Šešku, name of Babylon (Delitzsch Paradies 215);—Je 51:41 and hence (perhaps gloss) 25:26 (v. Gie).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign 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.
שֵׁשַׁךְ
- 1. (b. h.) Sheshach, surname of Babylonia (supposed permutation of בבל by Atbash, v. א"ת). Num. R. s. 1821, v. א"ת. Meg. 6ᵃ, v. רַקַּת.
- 2. בר ש׳ pr. n. m. Bar Sheshach, a Persian officer. Ab. Zar. 65ᵃ Ms. M. (ed. שֵׁישַׁךְ).
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 2 distinct written forms H8347 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שֵׁשַׁ֔ךְ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 51:41 | 1 |
| שֵׁשַׁ֖ךְ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 25:26 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Sheshach). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
(Jer. 25:26), supposed to be equivalent to Babel (Babylon), according to a secret (cabalistic) mode of writing among the Jews of unknown antiquity, which consisted in substituting the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the first, the last but one for the second, and so on. Thus the letters sh, sh, ch become b, b, l, i.e., Babel. This is supposed to be confirmed by a reference to Jer. 51:41, where Sheshach and Babylon are in parallel clauses. There seems to be no reason to doubt that Babylon is here intended by this name. (See Streane's Jeremiah, l.c.)
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(from the goddess Shach, reduplicated) is a term which occurs only in (Jeremiah 25:26; 51:41) where it is evidently used as a synonym for either Babylon or Babylonia.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
bag of flax or linen
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
