חָטַף
to seize
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
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
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, Qal, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct 1 time (33%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (33%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 3 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H2414 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.
Judges 1 verse
Psalms 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.
חטף (châṭaph) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to seize.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Judges, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Judges 21:21. It clusters with חטיפא under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2414 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.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Catch 2×
- American Standard Version: Catch 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Catch 1×, He catches 1×, Seize 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: He seizes 1×, Seize 1×, You shall catch 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2414 across 3 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2414 across 3 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 H2414 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2414 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 1 sense 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.
- (Qal) to catch, seize
Word origin
חָטַף vb. catch, seize
— 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.
חָטַף
- 1. to seize, rob. Y. Ber. I, 3ᶜ bot. (ref. to I Kings VIII, 54) ככפים הללו שלא חָטְפוּ בבנין וכ׳ ed. Krot. (oth. ed. נטפו, prob. נִטְנְפוּ, v. טָנַף) like those hands which did not rob anything at building the Temple. Lam. R. to I, 1 וחֲטָפוֹ ממנה and snatched it (the letter of divorce) out of her hands; a. fr.—Koh. R. to VII, 26, v. חָטַב. e.g. 1 Kings 8:54
- 2. (cmp. Lat. carpo) to do a thing with haste, esp. (v. Ber. 35ᵃ sq., Tosef. ib. IV, 1) to break without benediction. Tosef. Pes. X, 9 חוֹטְפִין מצה לתינוק matzah is distributed among the children before the regular turn in the Passover ceremonies, in order that they may not fall asleep; Pes. 109ᵃ (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 50; oth. opin. in comment.). Part. pass. חָטוּף, f. חֲטוּפָה snatched, abrupt. M. Kat. 28ᵃ מת פתאם מיתה ח׳ if one dies suddenly, it is called an abrupt death (snatched by death); Treat. S’maḥ. ch. III לארבעה … מיתה ח׳ after four or five days of sickness, it is called &c.; v. דָּחַף.—אמן ח׳, v. אָמֵן II.
- to be snatched, hurried. Y. Ber. VIII, end, 12ᶜ he who says ‘a hurried Amen’—יִתְחַטְּפוּ שנותיו his years will be hurried (he will die an untimely, sudden death, v. supra); Bab. Ber. 47ᵃ
חֲטַף
- 1. to seize, snatch. Targ. Jud. XXI, 21. Targ. I Kings XX, 33 וחטפוהא מיניה they snatched the word hastily from him (h. text ויחלטו הממנו); a. e.—B. Bath. 33ᵇ, sq. דמִיחֲטַף חַטְפָהּ מיניה that he took it from him forcibly. Ḥull. 133ᵃ היה חֲטִיפְנָא מתנתא I used to take the priest’s gifts eagerly (v. חֲבַב). Erub. 54ᵃ חֲטוֹף ואכול וכ׳ make haste and eat &c. (enjoy life, while you live).
- 2. to do violence, strain (the text), to misinterpret. Targ. Ez. XXII, 26.
- 3. (of animals of prey) to tear. Targ. II Esth. I, 2 דובין חטפין (read: דֵּיבִין) the wolves (on Solomon’s throne) made an attempt to tear (the false witness). Ib. למחטיף לבהון וכ׳, as if to tear the hearts &c.
- same. Ib. (of hawks).
- to be robbed, be snatched. Targ. Prov. XIII, 2.—Y. Kidd. I, 60ᵇ top והיא מִתְחַטְּפָא and it is taken by force (confiscated).
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 3 distinct written forms H2414 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/חֲטַפְתֶּ֥ם | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Judges 21:21 | 1 |
| יַחְטֹ֥ף | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 10:9 | 1 |
| לַ/חֲט֣וֹף | Verb, Qal, Infinitive Construct | Psalms 10:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2414, 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.
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 1 verse that also exists 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.
