תּוֹחֶ֫לֶת
hope
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 5 times (83%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8431 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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.
Job 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 3 verses
- Proverbs 10:28 תּוֹחֶ֣לֶת n c fs cs The prospect of the righteous is joy, But the hope of the wicked will perish.
- Proverbs 11:7 וְ/תוֹחֶ֖לֶת conj + n c fs cs When a wicked man dies, hope perishes, And expectation of power comes to nothing.
- Proverbs 13:12 תּוֹחֶ֣לֶת n c fs Hope deferred makes the heart sick, But when longing is fulfilled, it is a tree of life.
Lamentations 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.
תוחלת (tôwcheleth) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “hope.” It clusters heavily in Proverbs, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. With 6 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Job 41:9. It clusters with יחל, יחיל and יחלאל under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8431 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 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 6 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 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: Hope 4×
- American Standard Version: Hope 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hope 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hope 4×, Hope of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8431 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H8431 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8431 across 6 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 H8431 across 6 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.
- hope
Word origin
n.f. hope, abs. ת׳ Pr 13:12; cstr. id. Pr 10:28; 11:7; sf. תּוֹחַלְתִּי ψ 39:8 La 3:18; תֹּחַלְתּוֹ Jb 41:1;—hope, sq. subj. gen. Jb 41:1 Pr 10:28; 11:7 La 3:18; sq. subj. gen. + לְ ψ 39:8 (תּוֹחַלְתִּי לְךָ); alone Pr 13:12.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from יחל (yâchal) (H3176) — to wait.
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.
תּוֹחֶלֶת
- 1. hope, expectation; that which may be looked for, good, use. Y. Pes. VI, beg. 33ᵃ אפשר שיש ממנו ת׳ possibly something good can come from him (may be he can enlighten us). Ib. כבר אמרנו שיש ממך ת׳ we have said that a good thing may be expected of thee. Ib. כבר אמרנו אם יש ת׳ מבבלי we have said, can we expect anything of a Babylonian? Num. R. s. 215 אין הימנו ת׳ וכ׳ nothing of consequence can come of him, he cannot beget &c. Ib. וכי יש בו ת׳ is there any good in it (can the golden calf produce any effect)? Midr. Till. to Ps. XXXVII, 2 חציר הם תּוֹחַלְתָּם what good there is in them is mere grass (cmp. Is. XL, 6). Yalk. Job 909; Gen. R. s. 27 (ref. to Gen. VI, 5) משהיתה … לא היתה בהם ת׳ from sunrise to sunset they achieved nothing good; Yalk. ib. 47. Ib. 35, v. תּוֹעֶלֶת. Num. R. s. 208 אם יבוא … אין בו ת׳ if he (Balaam) will be ready to go with us, he will succeed, but if he should delay even one hour, he will be of no use; a. e. e.g. Isaiah 40:6
- 2. (homilet.) prayer (as if from חָלָה). Ber. 32ᵇ; 55ᵃ כל המאריך … שנ׳ ת׳ וכ׳ he who makes long prayer and speculates on it (v. עוּן h.) comes to sickness of heart, for it is said (Prov. XIII, 12) a prolonged prayer makes the heart sick; Yalk. Prov. 950; Yalk. Deut. 854. e.g. Proverbs 13:12
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 H8431 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| תּוֹחֶ֣לֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 13:12 | 2 |
| וְ/תוֹחֶ֖לֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 11:7 | 1 |
| וְ/תוֹחַלְתִּ֖/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Lamentations 3:18 | 1 |
| תּ֝וֹחַלְתִּ֗/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 39:7 | 1 |
| תֹּחַלְתּ֥/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Job 41:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8431, 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 → 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
