דּוּדַי
mandrake
‘mandrake’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
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).
Every verse where H1736 appears in the Book of Jeremiah — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Jeremiah
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.
“mandrake” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun דודי (dûwday). With only 5 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. More than half of its appearances fall in Genesis. First canonically at Genesis 30:14, it enters the text early. Catalogued under 2 senses, its meaning is not single-sense. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H1736 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 5 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 3 verses 60%
- Song of Solomon 1 verse 20%
- Jeremiah 1 verse 20%
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 5 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 verses · 60%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 20%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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).
- King James Version: Mandrakes 6×
- American Standard Version: 's mandrakes 3×, Mandrakes 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Mandrakes 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: S mandrakes 4×, Mandrakes 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H1736 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H1736 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 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 H1736 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H1736 across 9 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 BDB
The 2 senses BDB distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency or importance). The full entry — with sub-senses — is in the Lexicon Entry tab.
- mandrake, love-apple
- as exciting sexual desire, and favouring procreation
Word origin
[ דּוּדַי ] n.m. mandrake —On דּוּדָאֵי vessels, baskets, v. דּוּד
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דוד (dûwd) (H1731) — pot.
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.
דּוּדָא
- boiler, caldron, pot. Targ. II Kings IV, 38; a. e.—Snh. 64ᵃ, v. אֲבָרָא; a. fr.—Pl. דּוּדַיָּא, דּוּדֵי. Targ. Zach. XIV, 20; a. e.—Nidd. 68ᵃ ד׳ תסרת thou wantest boilers (for hot water). B. Kam. 101ᵃ top, v. כַּפְרָא. Sabb. 41ᵃ, v. אַנְטִיכִי.—Fem. דּוּדְוָותָא, דַּדְוָו׳. Targ. Y. Ex. XVI, 3; XXXVIII, 3; a. e. Targ. Y. Lev. VIII, 31 דּוֹדְוָותַיָּא (!).
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 7 distinct written forms H1736 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/דוּדָאֵ֖י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 30:16 | 1 |
| דּוּדָאֵ֖י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 30:15 | 1 |
| דּוּדָאֵ֣י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 24:1 | 1 |
| דּוּדָאֵ֥י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 30:15 | 1 |
| דֽוּדָאִים֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 30:14 | 1 |
| הַֽ/דּוּדָאִ֣ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 7:13 | 1 |
| מִ/דּוּדָאֵ֖י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Genesis 30:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H1736, 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
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 → 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 5 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
