זְנוּת
harlotry
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
2 distinct verses where H2184 appears in the Absolute state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Hosea 2 verses
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 noun זנות centers on the idea of “harlotry.” Older and newer Bibles part ways — “whoredom” in the King James Version, “prostitution” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions. See the renderings breakdown. It appears 9 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (33%), then Ezekiel and Hosea. Its earliest occurrence is Numbers 14:33. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2184 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 89%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 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).
- King James Version: Whoredom 5×, Whoredoms 2×
- American Standard Version: Whoredom 5×, Whoredoms 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Prostitution 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Prostitution 4×, Faithlessness 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2184 across 9 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2184 across 9 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 H2184 across 9 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 H2184 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 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 3 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.
- a. sexual Ho 4:11. e.g. Hosea 4:11
- b. international Ez 23:27. e.g. Ezekiel 23:27
- c. religious Nu 14:33 (J) Je 3:2, 9; 13:27 Ez 43:7, 9 Ho 6:10 (where WeKl. Proph. suggests זָנִיתָ); cf. זָנָה 3. e.g. Numbers 14:33
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
n.f.abstr. fornication;—ז׳ Ho 4:11; 6:10; sf. זְנוּתֵךְ Je 13:27 Ez 23:27; זְנוּתָהּ Je 3:9; זְנוּתָם Ez 43:7, 9; זְנוּתַיִךְ Je 3:2; זְנוּתֵיכֶם Nu 14:33.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from זנה (zânâh) (H2181) — to commit fornication.
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.
זְנוּת
- prostitution, unchastity, voluptuousness. Sot. IX, 15 (49ᵇ) בית הועד יהיה לז׳ (= לבית ז׳) the scholars’ meeting house shall become a place of licentiousness (where low people assemble). Num. R. s. 13 על ז׳ אחותו for seducing his sister. Ab. Zar. 36ᵇ דרך ז׳ a meretricious connection, opp. אִישׁוּת. Gen. R. s. 26 על הכל … חוץ מן הז׳ … the Lord is long-suffering to everything except debauchery. Keth. 3ᵃ, v. בְּעִילָה; a. v. fr.
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 9 distinct written forms H2184 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּ/זְנוּתַ֖יִ/ךְ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Jeremiah 3:2 | 1 |
| בִּ/זְנוּתָ֔/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 43:7 | 1 |
| זְנ֛וּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 4:11 | 1 |
| זְנ֣וּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Hosea 6:10 | 1 |
| זְנוּתֵ֔/ךְ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 13:27 | 1 |
| זְנוּתֵ֖/ךְ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 23:27 | 1 |
| זְנוּתֵי/כֶ֑ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 14:33 | 1 |
| זְנוּתָ֔/הּ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Jeremiah 3:9 | 1 |
| זְנוּתָ֛/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 43:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2184, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
