Bible word study

Tebel (Strong’s H8398): Meaning in the Bible

Tebel (תֵּבֵל) is the Hebrew word numbered H8398 in Strong’s concordance of the Bible. Strong’s defines it as the earth (as moist and therefore inhabited); by extension, the globe; by implication, its inhabitants; specifically, a particular land, as Babylonia, Palestine. In the King James Bible it is translated habitable part, world..

• Original wordתֵּבֵל
• Transliterationtêbêl
• Pronunciationtay-bale'
• Part of speechnoun (feminine) (n-f)
• Strong’s numberH8398
• LanguageHebrew

The full Strong’s definition

Derivation. from H2986;

How the King James Bible translates it

Where Tebel appears in the Bible

In the King James Bible’s text tagged with Strong’s numbers, Tebel (H8398) stands behind 36 English renderings in 36 verses across 10 of the 66 books. It is most frequent in Psalms (15), Isaiah (9), Job (3).

How the King James Bible renders Tebel, by count

• world35 of 36 (97 percent)
• part1 of 36 (3 percent)

Three places to read Tebel

• 1 Samuel 2:8 He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set them among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory: for the pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them.
• Psalms 77:18 The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven: the lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook.
• Isaiah 14:17 That made the world as a wilderness, and destroyed the cities thereof; that opened not the house of his prisoners?

Counts are made at build time from the King James text tagged with Strong’s numbers (eBible.org, public domain). Verses are read from the stored King James text, never typed.

Why the word matters

Every word the biblical writers chose carries weight. Studying Tebel in the original Hebrew lets you read the passages where it appears more carefully, closer to what the first hearers understood, so the meaning is drawn from the text itself rather than from the English alone.

The lexical data on this page comes from the public-domain Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890), a Hebrew and Greek dictionary keyed to the King James Bible. It is a reference tool, not a settled verdict: no single word decides a doctrine, and meaning is finally shaped by how a word is used in its sentences. Read the passages themselves, prayerfully, and in full.

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