הָמַם
to confuse
‘to confuse’ is one of 3 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2000 appears in the Book of Joshua — 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.
Joshua
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.
The Hebrew verb המם centers on the idea of “to confuse.” First canonically at Exodus 14:24, it enters the text early. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 14 verses — uncommon. Lexicons map it across 3 senses. It clusters with הום, המה and מהומה under a shared root. Dig into 14-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2000 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 →
- 14
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 14 distinct verses.
- 11 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 11 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,752
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,752 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 14 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 2 verses 14%
- Deuteronomy 2 verses 14%
- Psalms 2 verses 14%
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 14 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 43%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 29%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 29%
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: Discomfited 5×
- American Standard Version: Discomfited 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Routed them 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He panicked them 3×, And 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2000 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2000 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 H2000 across 14 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 H2000 across 16 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 3 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.
- to move noisily, confuse, make a noise, discomfit, break, consume, crush, destroy, trouble, vex
(Qal)
- to move noisily
- to confuse, discomfit, vex
Word origin
הָמַם vb. make a noise, move noisily, confuse, discomfit
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from הום (hûwm) (H1949) — to roar.
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.
הָמַם
- 1. to confound. Tanḥ. Vayera 22 הֲמָמוֹ והלך וכ׳ He confounded him (took him by surprise), and thus he (Abraham) went to sacrifice his son; Gen. R. s. 55.—Mekh. B’shall. s. 5 (ref. to Ex. XIV, 24) הֲמָמָן ערבבן He confounded them, He brought confusion into their ranks; ib. s. 2; a. e. e.g. Exodus 14:24
- 2. to stir up, sweep (v. next w.). Lam. R. introd. (R. Abbahu 2) (expl. הכביד, Is. VIII, 23, and ref. to Targ. Is. XIV, 23) הֲמָמָם כבמכביד he swept them as with a broom (Num. R. s. 23, end, a. e. הכבידן, v. כָּבַד); Yalk. Is. 282 ה׳ במכבד. [הוּמָם, denom. of מוּם q. v.] e.g. Isaiah 8:23
הֲמַם I
- ; Pa. הַמֵּם, or Af. אַהֲמֵם to sweep. Targ. Is. XIV, 23 (h. text טאטא).
הֲמַם II
- Ithpa. אִתְהָמַם (denom. of מוּם) to mutilate one’s self (h. הִתְגּוֹדֵד). Targ. O. Deut. XIV, 1 (ed. Berl. תתח׳, v. Berl. Massor. p. 90). Targ. I Kings XVIII, 28 Kimḥi (some ed. אתח׳); a. e.—Part. מִתְהָמַם mutilated. Targ. Jer. XLI, 5; XLVIII, 37 (some ed. מתח׳).
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 15 distinct written forms H2000 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2000, 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 6 — 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 14 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 14 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
- Exodus 14:24
- Deuteronomy 2:15
- Joshua 10:10
- Judges 4:15
- 1 Samuel 7:10
- 2 Samuel 22:15
- 2 Chronicles 15:6
- Esther 9:24
- Psalms 18:14
- Isaiah 28:28
- Jeremiah 51:34
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.
