זָעַף
to be angry
‘to be angry’ 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”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 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, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (40%)
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (20%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (20%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 5 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2196 appears — 4 distinct verses across 4 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 1 verse
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Daniel 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.
At its core, זעף (zâʻaph) means “to be angry.” A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Genesis (25% of all occurrences). Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 40:6. BDB distinguishes 3 senses for it. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2196 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Genesis 1 verse 25%
- 2 Chronicles 1 verse 25%
- Proverbs 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 75%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 25%
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: Behold they were sad 1×, Fretteth 1×, He was wroth 1×
- American Standard Version: Fretteth 1×, He was wroth 1×, Them 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: He raged 1×, Looking thinner 1×, Rages 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 1×, He raged 1×, Looking worse 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2196 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2196 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2196 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2196 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 fret, be sad, be wroth, be vexed, be enraged, be out of humour
(Qal)
- to appear perplexed, appear troubled
- to be sad-looking
Word origin
[ זָעַף ] vb. be out of humour, vexed; be enraged
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
זָעַף
- to be excited, troubled, serious.—Part. act. זוֹעֵף; f. זוֹעֶפֶת, pl. זוֹעֲפוֹת, part. pass. זָעוּף; f. זְעוּפָה; pl. זְעוּפוֹת. Pesik. R. s. 21 פנים זוע׳ (a. זעו׳) serious (commanding) countenance. Pesik. Baḥod. p. 110ᵃ; Yalk. Ex. 286 פנים זו׳, contrad. to בינוניות indifferent, מסבירות inviting, kind countenance.
זְעַף
- , to rage, threaten, storm. Targ. Ps. L, 3 (h. text נשערה). Ib. X, 5 (h. text יפיח).—Gen. R. s. 63 בעא רבי דיִזְעוֹף ביה Rabbi wanted him (R. S.) to threaten him; Yalk. ib. 110 דיִזְעַף (Y. Ter. VIII, end, 46ᶜ למינזף).
זַעַף
- preced. wds.) stormwind, vehemence; anger. Taan. III, 8 התחילו לירד בז׳ the rain began to come down with vehemence. Pesik. R. s. 15, v. אַגְרִיאוֹן. Treat. S’maḥ. III, 9 מיתה של ז׳ a sudden death (by the anger of the Lord); cmp. M. Kat. 28ᵃ, s. v. דָּחַף.
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 5 distinct written forms H2196 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וַ/יִּזְעַף֙ | Verb, Qal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 2 Chronicles 26:19 | 1 |
| וּ/בְ/זַעְפּ֣/וֹ | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | 2 Chronicles 26:19 | 1 |
| זֹֽעֲפִ֗ים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Daniel 1:10 | 1 |
| זֹעֲפִֽים | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Genesis 40:6 | 1 |
| יִזְעַ֥ף | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Proverbs 19:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2196, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
