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חֹ֫נֶף

godlessness

H2612 Strong's Hebrew
chôneph Transliteration
/kho'-nef/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

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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.

The Hebrew noun חנף centers on the idea of “godlessness.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 1 of 1 verses. A true hapax — its single appearance is Isaiah 32:6. Sharing its root, it stands alongside חנף, חנף and חנפה. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
hypocrisy
Modern gloss
godlessness
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H2612 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 →

1
distinct verses
The word appears in 1 distinct verse.
1 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
Isaiah 32:6
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Isaiah 32:6.
#6,101
by frequency
Rank #6,101 (rank 6,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 1 occurrence in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 1 · 100%

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 1 distinct verse.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 100%

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: Hypocrisy 1×
  • American Standard Version: Profaneness 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Ungodliness 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Godlessness 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2612 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Hypocrisy” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H2612 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Profaneness” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H2612 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ungodliness” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H2612 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Godlessness” 1×

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.

  1. hypocrisy, godlessness, hypocrite, profaneness

Word origin

n.[m.] profaneness—לַעֲשׂוֹת ח׳ Is 32:6 to practise profaneness (+ נְבָלָה, אָוֶן, תּוֹעָה).

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from חנף (chânêph) (H2610) — to be profaned.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 696a


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.

חָנַף

  • (b. h.) [to bend, decline from the right path,] to be insincere, to flatter; to show favor in court; to deceive. Der. Er. Zuta ch. II אֶחְנוֹף לזה וכ׳ I will flatter (lower myself before) this one that he may give me to eat &c.
    • same. Sot. 41ᵇ הִחְנִיפוּ לו וכ׳ thy flattered Agrippa (saying to him, ‘Thou art our brother’). Ib. מותר להַחְנִיף וכ׳ it is permissible to flatter (submit to the power of) the wicked &c. Y. Ber. VII, 11ᶜ. Pesik. R. s. 25 (ref. to Is. XXIV, 5) הבריות מַהֲנִיפִים זה לזה men deal insincerely with one another; והוא מַחֲנִיפוֹ וכ׳ and he puts him (the priest or Levite) off with deceptive intent, and says &c.; a. fr. e.g. Isaiah 24:5

חֲנֵף

  • , Pa. חַנֵּיף ch. same. M. Kat. 17ᵃ דאפי׳ … לא חַנִּיפִי ליה not even a man like thee did I flatter. Shebu. 30ᵃ לחַנּוּפֵי ליה that I should favor him in court?—Keth. 84ᵇ מְחַנְּפִיתוּ להו would you favor them?; ib. 63ᵇ מַחְנִיפִיתוּ ליה (Af.) would you favor him?—Pesik. Asser, p. 98ᵃ (ref. to Is. XXIV, 5) את סבר מְחַנְּפָא לה והיא מְחַנְּפָה לך thou meanest to deceive it (the land by withholding the tithes, v. preced.), but it will disappoint thee; Tanḥ. R’eeh 14 את כבר מחנף וכ׳ (corr. acc.). e.g. Isaiah 24:5
    • same, v. supra.

חָנֵף

  • preced. wds.) hypocrite, flatterer; faithless, arbitrary, fickle. Esth. R. to I, 1 (ref. to Job XXXIV, 30) בשעה שהמלך ח׳ וכ׳ when a king is arbitrary and rules tyrannically &c. Ib. שהיה ח׳ וכ׳ for he (Ahasverus) was arbitrary, for he put to death &c.—Pl. חֲנֵפִים, חֲנֵפִין, חֲנֵי׳. Tosef. Yoma V (IV), 12; Yoma 86ᵇ מפרסמין את החנ׳ וכ׳ you may expose the hypocrites to prevent defamation of the divine Name. Koh. R. to IV, 1 חֲנֵיפֵי תורה pretenders of scholarship. Sot. 42ᵃ; Treat. Der. Er. ch. II. Ib. חֲנֵפוֹת (masc., v. מָסוֹר); a. e. e.g. Job 34:30

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.


Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H2612, 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 1 verse that also exists in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 1 Hebrew verse 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

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Old Testament
Old Testament edition

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