תָּלַע
to wear scarlet
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
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H8529 appears — 1 distinct verse 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.
Nahum 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.
“to wear scarlet” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb תלע (tâlaʻ). It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Nahum, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Scripture uses it exactly once, at Nahum 2:3. From the same root come תולע and תולע. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8529 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 →
- 1
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #6,101
- by frequency
- Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Nahum 1 verse 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 1 distinct verse.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Are in scarlet 1×
- American Standard Version: Are in scarlet 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Are dressed in scarlet 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are clothed in scarlet 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8529 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8529 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8529 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8529 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- (Pual) to clad in scarlet, be wearing scarlet
Word origin
[ תָּלַע ] vb. Pu. denom. clad in scarlet;— Na 2:4
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from תולע (tôwlâʻ) (H8438) — worm.
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.
תָּלַע
- , Hif. הִתְלִיעַ (denom. of תּוֹלָע)
- 1. to become wormeaten; to decay. Kil. II, 3 עד שתַּתְלִיעַ until the seed in the ground begins to rot; Y. ib. 27ᵈ top עד כמה היא מַתְלַעַת וכ׳ R. S. to Kil. l. c. (ed. מזרעת, corr. acc.) how long does it take to rot? Three days in moist ground &c. Ḥull. 58ᵃ שהִתְלִיעָה, v. אֵב. Y. Ber. II, 5ᶜ top והִתְלִיעוּ תאינותיו (not תיה …) and his figs (on the tree) became wormy (or rotten). Cant. R. to IV, 6; Gen. R. s. 47 התליעו they decayed. B. Kam. 52ᵃ שה׳ מתוכו when the board that covered the pit rotted from the inside; a. fr.
- 2. to remove the wormy parts from; to sort wood. Midd. II, 5 ששם … מַתְלִיעִים את העצים for there the priests … sorted the wood for the altar.
- 1. to drive vermin off. Y. Shebi. II, 33ᵈ מְתַלְּעִין, v. זָהַם. Y. Sabb. VII, 10ᵃ top המעשן המְתַלֵּעַ וכ׳ he who fumigates plants, or smears them with rancid oil to keep the worms off &c.—Part. pass. מְתוּלָּע; f. מְתוּלַּעַת; pl. מְתוּלָּעִים, מְתוּלָּעִין; מְתוּלָּעוֹת wormy. B. Bath. VI, 2 (93ᵇ) תאנים מקבל … מת׳ וכ׳ if one buys figs, he must accept ten wormy ones for each hundred; (Y. ed. מַתְלִיעוֹת Hif., v. supra).—[
- 2. (b. h.) to dye scarlet; to clothe in scarlet.—V. תּוֹלֵעָה.]
תְּלַע I
- Af. אַתְלַע same, to become wormy; to rot.—Part. pass. מַתְלַע; pl. מַתְלְעֵי. Snh. 108ᵇ חיזרא כי מ׳ bran that had grown wormy. M. Kat. 10ᵇ כיון דמ׳ וכ׳ because the dates may get wormy, they are like goods that may depreciate (and may be attended to during the festive week).
תְּלַע II
- to tear apart. Targ. Y. Lev. I, 17 (Ar. תלה, v. תְּלַח).
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8529, 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
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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.
