דָּג
fish
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 8 times (42%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 7 times (37%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (21%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 19 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H1709 appears — 18 distinct verses across 13 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.
Genesis 1 verse
Numbers 1 verse
1 Kings 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Nehemiah 3 verses
- Nehemiah 3:3 הַ/דָּגִ֔ים ptcl def.art + n c mp The fish gate did the sons of Hassenaah build; they laid the beams of it, and set up the doors of it, the bolts of it, and the bars of it.
- Nehemiah 12:39 הַ/דָּגִ֗ים ptcl def.art + n c mp and above the gate of Ephraim, and by the old gate, and by the fish gate, and the tower of Hananel, and the tower of Hammeah, even to the sheep gate: and they stood still in the gate of the guard.
- Nehemiah 13:16 דָּ֖אג n c ms There lived men of Tyre also therein, who brought in fish, and all manner of wares, and sold on the Sabbath to the children of Judah, and in Jerusalem.
Job 2 verses
Psalms 1 verse
Ecclesiastes 1 verse
Ezekiel 1 verse
Hosea 1 verse
Jonah 2 verses
Habakkuk 1 verse
Zephaniah 2 verses
- Zephaniah 1:3 וּ/דְגֵ֣י conj + n c mp cs I will sweep away man and animal. I will sweep away the birds of the sky, the fish of the sea, and the heaps of rubble with the wicked. I will cut off man from the surface of the earth, says Yahweh.
- Zephaniah 1:10 הַ/דָּגִ֔ים ptcl def.art + n c mp In that day, says Yahweh, there will be the noise of a cry from the fish gate, a wailing from the second quarter, and a great crashing from the hills.
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, דג (dâg) means “fish.” First canonically at Genesis 9:2, it enters the text early. It appears 18 verses across 13 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. It shares a root with דגה, דגן and דגה. Dig into 18-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1709 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 →
- 18
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 18 distinct verses.
- 13 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 13 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,563
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,563 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 18 occurrences in the concordance →
By section of the Old Testament
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 18 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 44%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 8 verses · 44%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 11%
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†: Fish 9×, Fishes 5×
- American Standard Version†: Fish 8×, Fishes 5×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Fish 15×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Fish 12×, Fish of 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1709 across 19† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1709 across 18† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H1709 across 19† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H1709 across 20† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
דג I fish, cf. דָּג sub דגה.
דג II Jon 2
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. fish, cf. דָּג sub דגה.
I. n.m. Jon 2:1 fish (NH id.)—דָּג Jon 2:1(×2), 11 + Ne 13:16 Qr (Kt דָּאג); דָּגִים 1 K 5:13 + 6 times; דְּגֵי Gn 9:2 + 7 times;—fish of sea Jon 2:1(×2), 11 (in v 1 ד׳ גָּדוֹל); Ne 13:16 (דָּאג Kt דָּג article of Tyrian trade; only here coll., read perhaps דָּגָה; or regard as late usage, cf. converse דָּגָה of individual Jon 2:2);—elsewhere always pl.: as subj. of Solomon’s utterance 1 K 5:13; fish-spear צִלְצַל דגים Jb 40:31; most often דְּגֵי הַיָּם Gn 9:2 (P), ψ 8:9 Ho 4:3 Zp 1:3 Ez 38:20 Jb 12:8 (in all opp. to beasts & birds, & appar. used with them, + רֶמֶשׂ Ez. cf. vb. רמשׂ Gn, for animal creation in general; also Hb 1:14 cf. infr.); Nu 11:22 (JE) of fish (with beasts) as food (cf. Gn 9:2f.) in simile of men ensnared, like fish taken in net (מְצוֹדָה) Ec 9:12 cf. Hb 1:14 (דְּגֵי הַיָּם); 4 times שַׁעַר הַדָּגִים fish-gate 2 Ch 33:14 Zp 1:10 Ne 3:3; 12:39 (on situation cf. שַׁעַר).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דגה (dâgâh) (H1711) — to multiply.
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.
דָּג
- (b. h.) fish. ד׳ טמא unclean fish, forbidden in dietary laws, ד׳ טהור clean, permitted. Bekh. I, 2; a. fr.—Pl. דָּגִים. Ḥull. VIII, 1; a. fr.—M. Kat. 25ᵇ דְּגֵי רקק, v. לִוְיָתָן.—מַזַּל דָּגִים (or without מזל) The Fishes, Pisces, twelfth sign of the Zodiac. Pesik. R. s. 20; a. e.; v. גְּדִי.
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 14 distinct written forms H1709 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that state’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| דְּגֵ֥י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 9:2 | 3 |
| דְּגֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Ezekiel 38:20 | 2 |
| הַ/דָּגִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Nehemiah 3:3 | 2 |
| וּ/דְגֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 8:8 | 2 |
| דָּ֖אג | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nehemiah 13:16 | 1 |
| דָּ֣ג | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:17 | 1 |
| דָּגִ֣ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 41:7 | 1 |
| הַ/דָּ֔ג | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:17 | 1 |
| הַ/דָּגִ֗ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Nehemiah 12:39 | 1 |
| הַ/דָּגִֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Kings 4:33 | 1 |
| הַ/דָּגִים֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 33:14 | 1 |
| כִּ/דְגֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Habakkuk 1:14 | 1 |
| כַּ/דָּגִים֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ecclesiastes 9:12 | 1 |
| לַ/דָּ֑ג | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 2:10 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1709, 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
Shares the same root
Derived from this word
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 → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 13 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 18 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
- Genesis 9:2
- Numbers 11:22
- 2 Chronicles 33:14
- Job 12:8
- Psalms 8:8
- Ecclesiastes 9:12
- Ezekiel 38:20
- Hosea 4:3
- Jonah 2:10
- Habakkuk 1:14
- Zephaniah 1:3
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.
