Ḥŏlî describes sickness or infirmity in the selected illness accounts and servant passage. First Kings 17:17 narrates a child's sickness worsening until no breath remains, followed by Elijah's petition and the child's restored life.
Reading a lexicon entry
What this page is: Each lexicon entry shows the original Hebrew or Greek word behind the English translation: its meaning, its range of use, and where it appears in Scripture.
Strong's number: The Strong's code (H- or G-) is the standard reference number for this word. It connects this entry to chapter and passage language tabs.
Where it appears: The witness passages show where this word is used in context. Click any to open the study page for that passage.
This lexicon entry is part of our ongoing editorial review. If you notice missing content, unclear wording, or a possible correction, please send us a note through theConnect page. Screenshots are helpful.
Reader summary
Full entry for חֳלִי (H2483) · Open the biblical lexicon
Ḥŏlî describes sickness or infirmity in the selected illness accounts and servant passage. First Kings 17:17 narrates a child's sickness worsening until no breath remains, followed by Elijah's petition and the child's restored life.
The BSB source-word alignment has 24 aligned rows for this entry. Common renderings include sickness (4), illness (3), his disease (2), . . . (1), [it] (1).
The source-word alignment first shows this entry at Deuteronomy 7:15. Its strongest book concentrations include 2 Chronicles (6), 2 Kings (4), Isaiah (4), Deuteronomy (3).
Ḥŏlî describes sickness or infirmity in the selected illness accounts and servant passage. First Kings 17:17 narrates a child's sickness worsening until no breath remains, followed by Elijah's petition and the child's restored life. Second Kings 13:14 describes the illness from which Elisha will die. The different outcomes prevent a teacher from making every occurrence an accusation of deficient faith or a promise of recovery on a fixed schedule.
Psalm 41:3 speaks of the Lord sustaining a person on the sickbed, while Isaiah 53:4 describes infirmities carried by the servant alongside the observers' mistaken assessment. Matthew 8 explicitly cites Isaiah in connection with Jesus' healing works. Those witnesses deserve careful connection, but the Hebrew noun alone cannot settle every question about suffering, healing or a particular patient's condition. Teaching should keep each narrator's statement, petition and stated outcome distinct rather than assigning a universal explanation to all illness.
A restored child, Elisha's final illness, sickbed support and the servant's carried infirmities show differing settings and outcomes. The comparison protects illness language from becoming one causal diagnosis or an automatic measure of the sufferer's faith.
Later, the son of the woman who owned the house became ill, and his sickness grew worse and worse, until no breath remained in him.
The child's sickness reaches the point of no remaining breath before Elijah petitions the Lord. The narrated restoration must be distinguished from a universal outcome promised by the illness noun.
When Elisha had fallen sick with the illness from which he would die, Jehoash king of Israel came down to him and wept over him, saying, “My father, my father, the chariots and horsemen of Israel!”
Elisha's illness is explicitly identified as the one from which he will die. His prophetic service remains part of the narrative, challenging a simple illness-equals-unfaithfulness judgment.
The Lord will sustain him on his bed of illness and restore him from his bed of sickness.
The Lord's support is described at the sickbed within a psalm of care, petition and vulnerability. The verse does not identify every present patient's medical cause or timetable.
Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.
The servant carries infirmities while the observers confess their earlier assessment of him as stricken. Speaker assessment and the passage's developing explanation must remain distinct.
BSB source-word alignment connects this entry to exact verse rows, English rendering, source form, transliteration, and parsing.
How English Renders ItA compact distribution from source-word alignment before the full evidence tables.
Hebrew word. Physical illness extending into emotional distress; captures both bodily disease and psychological anguish from suffering
Physical illness extending into emotional distress; captures both bodily disease and psychological anguish from suffering
malady, anxiety, calamity BDB: sickness Usage: disease, grief, (is) sick(-ness).
How this word appears across different grammatical cases and numbers.
The mother in First Kings 17 voices anguish and asks whether her child's death is connected with her iniquity. That question is a character's distressed interpretation, not a dictionary definition of sickness or a universal rule explaining every child's suffering. Elijah prays, and the narrative reports restored life. Second Kings records Elisha becoming sick with the illness from which he dies, without removing his role as a prophet.
Those differences matter before an application is made. Psalm 41 invites attention to support and petition at a sickbed, while Isaiah distinguishes the servant's carried infirmities from the observers' mistaken judgment. Matthew 8:14-17 explicitly relates Jesus' healings to Isaiah's words. Christian teaching can follow that citation and encourage care, but should not treat illness as a spiritual ranking or claim that the lexical noun guarantees every believer's desired recovery within a chosen period.
2Kgs.13.14
Sickness and infirmity describe the selected bodily contexts, while English grief in the servant passage requires attention to the larger account. The noun does not encode one cause, duration or moral status for all cases of suffering.
Matthew 8:14-17 cites Isaiah's infirmity language after describing Jesus' healing activity. The citation supplies a direct Christian connection to the servant passage. It does not make ḥŏlî a diagnosis of a present reader or cancel the different illness outcomes narrated in Kings.