Tool Beta
Hebrew and Greek Without Learning Either
A walk through Genesis, the Psalms, and John, plus the key Hebrew and Greek words worth knowing. Each card is a place the English Bibles part company, and what in the Hebrew or Greek made them.
Psalm 7:1
A Shiggaion of David. A label used only twice in the whole Bible, with no confirmed meaning.
Psalm 7:1, in every translation this tool compares.
Imagine a musical score marked with a term you find in only one other piece of sheet music ever written, no dictionary, no manual, nothing to compare it against except that one other piece. That is Shiggaion's situation: two data points, and centuries of guessing between them.
Because the musical or literary label in this psalm's own heading, Shiggaion, occurs only twice in the entire Bible, here and in Habakkuk 3:1, leaving its precise meaning, a wild, impassioned song, a wandering melody, or something else entirely, a matter of educated guesswork rather than settled fact.
Every version simply transliterates Shiggaion, since there is no settled English equivalent, treating it the way Selah is treated, as a technical term left in its original form rather than translated.
שִׁגָּיוֹן Shiggaion · H7692
Shiggaion appears in the heading of this psalm and, in its plural form shigionoth, in the heading of Habakkuk 3, a prayer explicitly set to music. Proposed derivations connect it to a root meaning to wander or reel, suggesting a wild, emotionally intense, perhaps irregular musical or poetic form, a dithyramb or rhapsody in the loose sense of impassioned, less formally structured song, though no occurrence outside these two headings exists to confirm the guess.
English readers meet Shiggaion as an untranslated label at the top of a psalm, easy to skip past as mere technical scaffolding, with no way to sense how genuinely uncertain its meaning is, resting on only two attestations in the whole Bible.
A technical heading transliterated rather than translated, especially one this rare, is worth pausing on rather than skimming past. The translator's silence is itself information about how much, or how little, is actually known.
No translation is offered by any major version. The proposed sense, an intense, perhaps musically irregular or emotionally wild composition, is a reasonable guess from the proposed root and from the psalm's own agitated content, but remains unconfirmed by any third occurrence.
- Only other occurrence: Habakkuk 3:1, shigionoth, explicitly set to music
- Proposed root sense of wandering or reeling
