חַח
ring
also: hook, fetter, brooch fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 5 times (63%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 2 times (25%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2397 appears — 7 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.
Exodus 1 verse
2 Kings 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Ezekiel 4 verses
- Ezekiel 19:4 בַֽ/חַחִ֖ים prep det + n c mp The nations also heard of him; he was taken in their pit; and they brought him with hooks to the land of Egypt.
- Ezekiel 19:9 בַּֽ/חַחִ֔ים prep det + n c mp They put him in a cage with hooks, and brought him to the king of Babylon; they brought him into strongholds, that his voice should no more be heard on the mountains of Israel.
- Ezekiel 29:4 חחיים חַחִים֙ n c mp n c mp I will put hooks in your jaws, and I will cause the fish of your rivers to stick to your scales; and I will bring you up out of the midst of your rivers, with all the fish of your rivers which stick to your scales.
- Ezekiel 38:4 חַחִ֖ים n c mp and I will turn you about, and put hooks into your jaws, and I will bring you forth, and all your army, horses and horsemen, all of them clothed in full armor, a great company with buckler and shield, all of them handling swords;
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.
“ring” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun חח (châch). More than half of its appearances fall in Ezekiel. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. First canonically at Exodus 35:22, it enters the text early. Not a single-sense word, it carries 3 senses, among them “hook”, “fetter”, and “brooch”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2397 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 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 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 86%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 14%
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: Chains 2×, Hook 2×, Hooks 2×
- American Standard Version: Hooks 4×, Hook 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Hooks 4×, Hook 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Hooks 4×, Hook 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2397 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2397 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2397 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H2397 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- hook, ring, fetter, brooch
- hook, ring (in nose of captive)
- hook, ring (as jewellery)
Word origin
Derived from חוח (chôwach) (H2336) — thorn.
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.
חָח
- (b. h.) fastening, clasp, chain. Ex. R. s. 48, end.
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 H2397 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חַחִ֜/י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 19:28 | 2 |
| בַֽ/חַחִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 19:4 | 1 |
| בַּֽ/חַחִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 19:9 | 1 |
| חַחִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 38:4 | 1 |
| חַחִים֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 29:4 | 1 |
| חָ֣ח | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 35:22 | 1 |
| חחיים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Ezekiel 29:4 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2397, 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 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
