בָּחֵל
to loathe
also: abhor, feel loathing fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Pual verb in the Hebrew Bible →
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.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H973 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
Proverbs 1 verse
Zechariah 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.
At its core, בחל (bâchal) means “to loathe.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. The word gravitates to Proverbs (50%), then Zechariah. First canonically at Proverbs 20:21, it enters the text early. Not a single-sense word, it carries 2 senses, among them “abhor” and “feel loathing”. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H973 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Abhorred 1×
- American Standard Version†: Soul also loathed me 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Detested 1×, Gained 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Became impatient 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H973 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H973 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H973 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H973 across 1† tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Senses in the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 0 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
בחל I feel loathing
בחל II gotten by greed
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
I. [ בָּחֵל ] vb. feel loathing
II. [ בָּחֵל ] vb. only Pu. Pt. an inheritance gotten by greed Pr 20:21 Kt
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
בָּחַל I
- [1] to be disordered, sick; whence בּוֹחַל q. v.].—2) (denomin. of בֹּוחַל) to be in that stage of ripening when the fig is called boḥal; cmp. בָּאַשׁ. Nidd. 47ᵃ (quot. fr. Maasr. I, 2) התאנים משיִבְחֲלוּ … משילבינו וכ׳ figs are subject to tithes from the time they are called boḥal, which R. … defines, from the time their heads grow white.
- same. Shebi. IV, 7 בִּיחֲלוּ וכ׳ (Y. ed. בִּיחֵילוּ). Y. ib. 35ᵇ bot.; Y. Maasr. I, 48ᵈ (חִיְּתָה) מאי ביחילו חִיְּיתָה וכ׳ what is biḥ.? It (the fig) creates aversion (v. חוּת), as we read (Zech. XI, 8) &c. Maasr. I, 2 משיַבְחִילוּ (Y. ed. שביחילו), v. supra. [Cmp. בָּכַר as to spelling in Talm. Y.] e.g. Zechariah 11:8
בָּחַל II
- (= בהל, v. Prov. XX, 21, cmp. preced.) to hasten. Pi. בִּיחֵל to come early. Mekh. Bo, Pisḥa, 2 בי׳ אביב ובא ed. Livorno (oth. ed. כי חל corr. acc.) when the ripening of grains came very early. e.g. Proverbs 20:21
- to advance growth. Y. Sabb. VII, 10ᵃ top כל דבר שהוא מַבְחִיל (not שהיה מכחיל) whatever is done for advancing the fruits. Ib. לְהַבְחִיל (ed. Krot. להכחיל, corr. acc.).
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 H973 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בָּחֲלָ֥ה | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Zechariah 11:8 | 1 |
| מבחלת | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 20:21 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
