שְׁתָה
to drink
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 2 times (40%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8355 appears — 5 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.
Daniel 5 verses
- Daniel 5:1 שָׁתֵֽה Qal ptcp.act ms Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand.
- Daniel 5:2 וְ/יִשְׁתּ֣וֹן conj + Qal impf 3mp Belshazzar, while he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the golden and silver vessels which Nebuchadnezzar his father had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, might drink from it.
- Daniel 5:3 וְ/אִשְׁתִּ֣יו conj + Qal pf 3mp Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king and his lords, his wives and his concubines, drank from them.
- Daniel 5:4 אִשְׁתִּ֖יו Qal pf 3mp They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.
- Daniel 5:23 שָׁתַ֣יִן Qal ptcp.act mp but have lifted up yourself against the Lord of heaven; and they have brought the vessels of his house before you, and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines, have drunk wine from them; and you have praised the gods of silver and gold, of brass, iron, wood, and stone, which don't see, nor hear, nor know; and the God in whose hand your breath is, and whose are all your ways, you have not glorified.
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.
שתה — transliterated shᵉthâh — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to drink.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 5 verses. Its uses cluster heavily in Daniel (100% of all occurrences). Debuting at Daniel 5:1, it then recurs through the corpus. Sharing its root, it stands alongside שתה, משתה and שתי. 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 H8355 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.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 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: Drank 2×
- American Standard Version: Drank 1×, Drank from them 1×, Have drunk 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Drank 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, Drank 1×, Have drunk 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8355 across 5 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 H8355 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8355 across 5 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8355 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.
- (Peal) to drink
Word origin
Derived from שתה (shâthâh) (H8354) — to drink.
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.
שָׁתָה
- , v. שתי
שתי
- (b. h.) [to be settled, satisfied,] to drink. Pes. 86ᵇ השׁוֹתֶה כוסו וכ׳ he who drinks his cupful at one draught is called greedy (גַּרְגְּרָן). Ber. 51ᵃ מקבלו … ושׁוֹתֵהוּ בשמאל he must receive it (the medicine, v. אִסְפַּרְגּוֹס) with his right hand, and drink it (take it to his lips) with his left hand. Ib.ᵇ השותה כפלים he who drinks an even number of cups (v. זוּג). Tosef. Sot. XV, 11; B. Bath. 60ᵇ כשחרב … ושלא לִשְׁתּוֹת יין when the Temple was destroyed, … there were many scrupulous persons (פרושים, determined) not to eat meat nor drink wine. Ib. נִשְׁתֶּה יין וכ׳ should we drink wine, of which libations were offered on the altar? Ib. מים לא נשתה וכ׳ then let us drink no water, because water libation has ceased. Keth. 8ᵇ רבים שָׁתוּ רבים יִשְׁתּוּ many have drank (the cup of mourning), many shall drink, v. מִשְׁתֶּה. Nidd. 24ᵇ כמה … שָׁתַת אמו וכ׳ how much unmixed wine the mother of this embryo must have drunk!; a. fr.—Part. pass. שָׁתוּי being under the influence of drink. Erub. 64ᵃ שְׁתוּי יין אל וכ׳ Ms. M. (ed. only שָׁ׳) one feeling the wine must not pray, contrad. to שִׁכּוֹר, q. v. Lev. R. s. 12 שנכנסו שְׁתוּיֵי יין וכ׳ they (Nadab and Abihu) entered the Tabernacle while under the influence of wine; a. fr.—[Hif. from שָׁקָה q. v.]
שתי ²
- [to settle,]
- 1. to lay the foundation of; v. שָׁתַת II.
- 2. to fix the warp, start the loom, v. שְׁתִי.
- 1. to found, establish, v. שָׁתַת II.
- 2. to weave. Midr. Sam. ch. XIX (ref. to נסכתי, Ps. II, 6) הִשְׁתֵּיתִיו I have woven him (established him, ref. to מסכת, Jud. XVI, 14); Yalk. Is. 338; Yalk. Ps. 620 השיתיו (corr. acc.). e.g. Psalms 2:6
- to be established, started. Y. Yoma V, 42ᶜ, v. שְׁתִיָּה II; a. e.
- same. Tosef. Yoma III (II), 6 ed. Zuck. (Var. נשתת), v. שָׁתַת II
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 H8355 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אִשְׁתִּ֖יו | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Daniel 5:4 | 1 |
| וְ/אִשְׁתִּ֣יו | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Daniel 5:3 | 1 |
| וְ/יִשְׁתּ֣וֹן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Daniel 5:2 | 1 |
| שָׁתֵֽה | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 5:1 | 1 |
| שָׁתַ֣יִן | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 5:23 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8355, 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 → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 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.
