חַנּוּן
gracious
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2587 appears in the Book of Joel — 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.
Joel
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.
“gracious” is the headline sense of the Hebrew adjective חנון (channûwn). Scripture first uses it in Exodus 22:27. It appears 13 verses across 6 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a third of its appearances fall in Psalms. It shares a root with חנן, חן and חנה. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2587 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 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 13 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 9 verses · 69%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 15%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 15%
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: Gracious 5×, Is gracious 3×, He is gracious 2×
- American Standard Version: Gracious 5×, Is gracious 3×, He is gracious 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gracious 6×, Is gracious 5×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gracious 8×, Is gracious 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2587 across 13 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 H2587 across 13 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2587 across 13 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2587 across 13 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.
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.
- gracious
Word origin
adj. gracious, only used as an attribute of God, as hearing the cry of the vexed debtor Ex 22:26 (covt. code), ‖ מְרַחֵם ψ 116:5; elsewhere in the earlier phrase רַחוּם וְחַנּוּן Ex 34:6 (JE) = ψ 86:15; 103:8, or the later חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם 2 Ch 30:9; Ne 9:17, 31 ψ 111:4; 112:4; 145:8 Jo 2:13; Jon 4:2.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from חנן (chânan) (H2603) — to be gracious.
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.
חַנּוּן
- merciful, gracious Sabb. 133ᵇ.
חִנּוּן
- , v. חִינּ׳.—[בְּנֵי חִ׳, or חָנוּן pr. n. pl., v. הִינִי 3).]
חָנוּן I
- 1. part. pass. of חָנַן.
- 2. (v. next w.) supplied with an application of Henna; [oth. opin.: mercifully protected]; fem. חֲנוּנָה, pl. חֲנוּנוֹת. Sabb. V, 4 (expl. ib. 54ᵇ a compress dipped in oil; Y. ib. 7ᶜ top a wool-cap; oth. opin., v. next w.). [Ms. Maim. יַחְנוּנוֹת, quot. Löw Pfl. p. 213.]
חָנוּן II
- Henna, Alcanet, a plant of the leaves of which a paste is made for dyeing nails, hair &c. Sabb. 54ᵇ (ref. to חנינות, v. preced.) there is a tree in the sea-towns (Cyprus), וח׳ שמו וכ׳ ed. (Ms. M. יחנון) its name is ḥ., and a chip thereof is taken and put into the nostrils (of the sick ewe), that it may sneeze and be released of the worms in the head (v. Löw Pfl. p. 213 a. quotations).—Y. ib. V, 7ᶜ top it is a root ושמיה יַחְנוּנָה its name is yaḥnunah
חָנוּן III
- pr. n. m., v. חָנָן
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 H2587 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| חַנּ֣וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 4:2 | 3 |
| וְ/חַנּ֑וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 34:6 | 2 |
| חַנּ֖וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 111:4 | 2 |
| חַנּ֤וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 30:9 | 2 |
| חַנּ֥וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Exodus 22:27 | 2 |
| וְ/חַנּ֣וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 103:8 | 1 |
| חַנּ֧וּן | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Nehemiah 9:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2587, 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
- חן chên H2580 grace
- חנה chânâh H2583 to encamp
- חנות channôwth H2589 to be gracious
- חנינה chănîynâh H2594 compassion
- חנן chănan H2604 to show favour
- תחנה tᵉchinnâh H8467 supplication
- תחנון tachănûwn H8469 supplication
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- חנה Channâh H2584 Hannah
- חנון Chânûwn H2586 Hanun
- חניאל Channîyʼêl H2592 Hanniel
- חנן Chânân H2605 Hanan
- חננאל Chănanʼêl H2606 Hananeel
- חנני Chănânîy H2607 Hanani
- חנניה Chănanyâh H2608 Hananiah
- חנתן Channâthôn H2615 Hannathon
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 17 — not the complete family. 8 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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.
