אוֹנָן
Onan
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Onan’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H209 appears — 6 distinct verses across 3 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 4 verses
- Genesis 38:4 אוֹנָֽן n Proper She conceived again, and bore a son; and she named him Onan.
- Genesis 38:8 לְ/אוֹנָ֔ן prep + n Proper Judah said to Onan, "Go in to your brother's wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her, and raise up seed to your brother."
- Genesis 38:9 אוֹנָ֔ן n Proper Onan knew that the seed wouldn't be his; and it happened, when he went in to his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest he should give seed to his brother.
- Genesis 46:12 וְ/אוֹנָ֛ן וְ/אוֹנָן֙ conj + n Proper conj + n Proper The sons of Judah: Er, Onan, Shelah, Perez, and Zerah; but Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan. The sons of Perez were Hezron and Hamul.
Numbers 1 verse
1 Chronicles 1 verse
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.
אונן — transliterated ʼÔwnân — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Onan.” Its uses cluster heavily in Genesis (67% of all occurrences). With 6 verses in 3 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. First canonically at Genesis 38:4, it enters the text early. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H209 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 4 verses 67%
- Numbers 1 verse 17%
- 1 Chronicles 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 5 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 17%
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: Onan 8×
- American Standard Version: Onan 8×
- Berean Standard Bible: Onan 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Onan 8×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H209 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H209 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H209 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H209 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- Onan = "strong"
- second son of Judah…
Word origin
n.pr.m. (vigorous) son of Judah Gn 38:4, 8, 9; 46:12(×2); Nu 26:19(×2); 1 Ch 2:3.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אונו (ʼÔwnôw) (H207) — Ono.
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.
אוֹנֵן
- , v. אָנַן
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 H209 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/אוֹנָן֙ | Noun, Proper | Genesis 46:12 | 2 |
| אוֹנָ֔ן | Noun, Proper | Genesis 38:9 | 1 |
| אוֹנָֽן | Noun, Proper | Genesis 38:4 | 1 |
| וְ/אוֹנָ֑ן | Noun, Proper | Numbers 26:19 | 1 |
| וְ/אוֹנָ֖ן | Noun, Proper | Numbers 26:19 | 1 |
| וְ/אוֹנָ֛ן | Noun, Proper | Genesis 46:12 | 1 |
| לְ/אוֹנָ֔ן | Noun, Proper | Genesis 38:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H209, 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 → 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Onan). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Strong, the second son of Judah (Gen. 38:4-10; comp. Deut. 25:5; Matt. 22:24). He died before the going down of Jacob and his family into Egypt.
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
(strong), the second son of Judah by the Canaanitess, "the daughter of Shua." (Genesis 38:4; 1 Chronicles 2:3) "What he did was evil in the eyes of Jehovah and he slew him also, as he had slain his elder brother. (Genesis 38:9) His death took place before the family of Jacob went down into Egypt. (Genesis 46:12; Numbers 26:19) (B.C. 1706.)
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
