זָנַב
to cut off
‘to cut off’ 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
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
Person
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Sequential Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Piel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2179 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Joshua 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.
זנב — transliterated zânab — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to cut off.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 2 verses. More than half of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. It first appears in Deuteronomy 25:18. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. 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 H2179 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 50%
- Joshua 1 verse 50%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
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: Smite the hindmost 1×, Smote the hindmost 1×
- American Standard Version: Smite the hindmost 1×, Smote the hindmost 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Attack them from behind 1×, They attacked 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Attack 1×, Attacked 1×, Behind 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2179 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2179 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2179 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2179 across 4 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.
- to cut off
- (Piel) to attack the rear, smite the tail
Word origin
[ זִנֵּב ] vb. denom. Pi. cut off, or smite, the tail, only fig., of hostile attack in war
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from זנב (zânâb) (H2180) — tail.
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.
זָנָב
- (b. h.) attachment, tail. Bekh. VI, 9 זְנַב הגדי the tail of a kid; a. fr.—Yoma 41ᵇ זְ׳ לשון the tail-end (fringes) of the band. Erub. 18ᵃ (ref. to צלע, Gen. II, 22) ז׳ it means the tail (with which Adam was originally created). Kil. IV, 6 ואחת יוצאה ז׳ and one vine projects like a tail. Ukts. I, 3 ז׳ של אשכול the skeleton of the cluster of grapes (the thin branches), opp. to יד, the stem; a. fr.—Trnsf. the last, least. Ab. IV, 15, v. אֲרִי.—Euphem. membrum virile. Tanḥ. Ki Thetsé 10 (expl. ויזנב, Deut. XXV, 18) הכה אותן מכת ז׳ Amalek mutilated them by cutting off &c.; Pesik. Zakh., p. 27ᵃ; Pesik. R. s. 12; Num. R. s. 13; v. זְמוֹרָה.—Denom. e.g. Genesis 2:22
זִנֵּב
- Pi. (b. h.)
- 1. (v. Ukts. I, 3 quot. in preced. w.) to cut off the extreme branches of the vine, to trim. Shebi. IV, 6 המְזַנֵּב בגפנים he who trims grape-vines.—Trnsf. ז׳ באשכולות [to thin the clusters,] to diminish the scholars by persecution (v. אֶשְׁכּוֹל). Gen. R. s. 42; Lev. R. s. 11; a. e.
- 2. to attack, force a passage. Gen. R. s. 74 בקש לזַנְּבָן Joab wanted to force his passage through their territory; Yalk. Sam. 147.
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 2 distinct written forms H2179 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/זִנַּבְתֶּ֖ם | Verb, Piel, Sequential Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Joshua 10:19 | 1 |
| וַ/יְזַנֵּ֤ב | Verb, Piel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Deuteronomy 25:18 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2179, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
