Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

אֶתְבַּ֫עַל

Ethbaal

BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Ethbaal’ fuller range ↓

H856 Strong's Hebrew
ʼEthbaʻal Transliteration
/eth-bah'-al/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

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.

אתבעל (ʼEthbaʻal) is a Hebrew name most often rendered “Ethbaal.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. 1 Kings dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. A true hapax — its single appearance is 1 Kings 16:31. The sections below give every occurrence and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Ethbaal
Modern gloss
Ethbaal
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H856 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.
1 Kings 16:31
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in 1 Kings 16:31.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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: Ethbaal 1×
  • American Standard Version: Ethbaal 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Ethbaal 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ethbaal 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H856 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethbaal” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H856 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethbaal” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H856 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethbaal” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H856 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethbaal” 1×

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.

  1. Ethbaal = "with Baal"
  2. king of Sidon, father of Jezebel

Word origin

n.pr.m. Ethbaal (with Baal, i.e. living under B.’s favour; Ἰθόβαλος, Εἰθώβαλος JosAnt. viii, 13, 1, viii, 13, 2, c. Ap. 1, 18; on later king of like name, in Assyrian Tubaʾlu, v. COT Gn 10:15) king of Sidon, father of Jezebel 1 K 16:31.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from את (ʼêth) (H854) — with.

Part of speech: Proper Name Masculine


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H856, 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.


Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ethbaal). 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

With Baal, a king of Sidon (B.C. 940-908), father of Jezebel, who was the wife of Ahab (1 Kings 16:31). He is said to have been also a priest of Astarte, whose worship was closely allied to that of Baal, and this may account for his daughter's zeal in promoting idolatry in Israel. This marriage of Ahab was most fatal to both Israel and Judah. Dido, the founder of Carthage, was his granddaughter.

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

(with Baal), king of Sidon and father of Jezebel. (1 Kings 16:31) Josephus represents him as a king of the Tyrians as well as of the Sidonians. We may thus identify him with Eithobalus, who, after having assassinated Pheles, usurped the throne of Tyre for thirty-two years. The date of Ethbaal's reign may be given as about B.C. 940-908.

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

toward the idol, or with Baal

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.