חִידָה
riddle
also: difficult question, parable 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
- 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).
Every verse where H2420 appears in the Book of Habakkuk — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Habakkuk
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.
חידה (chîydâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “riddle.” Beyond its headline sense, its full sense range takes in “difficult question” and “parable”. With 17 verses in 9 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Judges, which alone accounts for 47% of its uses. It first appears in Numbers 12:8. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2420 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 →
- 17
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 17 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,671
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,671 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 17 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 17 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 11 verses · 65%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 29%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 6%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Riddle 9×, Dark sayings 2×, Hard questions 2×
- American Standard Version†: Riddle 6×, Dark sayings 2×, Hard questions 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Riddle 10×, Difficult questions 2×, Riddles 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Riddle 10×, Riddles 4×, Difficult questions 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2420 across 17† 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2420 across 17† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H2420 across 17† 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2420 across 17† 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.
7 senses and sub-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 7 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.
- 1. riddle = dark, obscure utterance Nu 12:8 (JE; opp. פֶּה־אֶל־פֶּה and מַרְאֶה); of something put indirectly and needing interpretation;—an allegory חוד ח׳ Ez 17:2 (‖ מְשֹׁל מָשָׁל); allegor. and fig. sayings Pr 1:6 (‖ מְלִיצָה מָשָׁל and דִּבְרֵי חֲכָמִים); enigmat. sentences and comparisons, declaring fate of Chaldeans Hb 2:6 (+ מְלִיצָה; ‖ מָשָׁל), perplexing moral problem ψ 49:5 (c. פָּתַח open, propound; ‖ מָשָׁל), a lesson taught indirectly ψ 78:2 (ח׳ מִנִּי קֶדֶם, c. הִבִּיעַ; ‖ מָשָׁל). e.g. Numbers 12:8
- 2. riddle, enigma, to be guessed, in Ju 14:
- a. with vb. חוּד Ju 14:12, 13, 16 propound a riddle. e.g. Judges 14:12
- b. with vb. הִגִּיד tell (give answer to) a riddle Ju 14:14, 15, 17, 19. e.g. Judges 14:14
- c. with vb. מצא find out a riddle Ju 14:18. e.g. Judges 14:18
- 3. perplexing questions by which queen of Sheba put Sol. to the test (נִסָּה) 1 K 10:1 = 2 Ch 9:1. e.g. 1 Kings 10:1
- 4. with הֵבִין skilled in double-dealing Dn 8:23 (Bev). e.g. Daniel 8:23
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. riddle, enigmatic, perplexing saying or question;—abs. ח׳ Ju 14:12 + 6 times; sf. חִידָתִי Ju 14:18 ψ 49:5; חִידָֽתְךָ Ju 14:13; pl. abs. חִידוֹת 1 K 10:1 + 4 times; חִידֹת Nu 12:8; sf. חִידֹתָם Pr 1:6;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חוד (chûwd) (H2330) — to propose a riddle.
Forms in the corpus
The 16 distinct written forms H2420 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2420, 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
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 17 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 17 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
- Numbers 12:8
- Judges 14:12
- 1 Kings 10:1
- 2 Chronicles 9:1
- Psalms 49:4
- Proverbs 1:6
- Ezekiel 17:2
- Daniel 8:23
- Habakkuk 2:6
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.
