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טָמָה

to be stopped up

‘to be stopped up’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓

H2933 Strong's Hebrew
ṭâmâh Transliteration
/taw-maw'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

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.

At its core, טמה (ṭâmâh) means “to be stopped up.” It is rare — just 1 verse in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in Job (100% of all occurrences). Scripture uses it exactly once, at Job 18:3. BDB distinguishes 2 senses for it. See the sense tree, 1-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
be defiled
Modern gloss
to be stopped up
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 H2933 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.
Job 18:3
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in Job 18:3.
#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

  • Job 1 verse 100%

By section of the Old Testament

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

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.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Reputed vile 1×, Shall ye make yourselves unclean 1×
  • American Standard Version: Are become unclean 1×, Shall ye make yourselves unclean 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Stupid 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: We are stupid 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H2933 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Reputed vile” 1×
  • “Shall ye make yourselves unclean” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H2933 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Are become unclean” 1×
  • “Shall ye make yourselves unclean” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H2933 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Stupid” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H2933 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “We are stupid” 1×

Senses in BDB

The 2 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.

  1. (Niphal) to be stopped up
  2. to be regarded as unclean (metaplastic)

Word origin

[ טָמָה ] vb. only Niph. we are stopped up, stupid Jb 18:3

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

Derived from טמא (ṭâmêʼ) (H2930) — to be unclean.

Part of speech: Verb TWOT: 810


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.

טָמֵא I

  • [to be filled up, inaccesible,] to be unclean; v. טָמֵא II.
    • 1. to make unclean, to soil, defile. Yoma 39ᵃ אדם מְטַמֵּא עצמו מעט מְטַמְּאִין וכ׳ if a man begins to defile himself a little (through sin), he will soon be defiled largely. Yad. III, 5, a. fr. מט׳ את הידים their handling makes the hands unclean (washing the hands is required after handling them). Kel. I, 1; a. v. fr.
    • 2. to declare unclean. Toh. VI, 2. Eduy. I, 11; a. v. fr.—Makhsh. VI, 2 טִימְּאוּ; Y. Dem. V, 24ᵈ טִימּוּ.
    • , Hithpa. הִתְטַמֵּא, הִיטַּמֵּא
    • 1. to become unclean, to be made unclean. Ukts. I, 1 מְטַמֵּא ומִיטַּמֵּא eventually makes unclean and becomes unclean. Kel. II, 1 מִיתְטַמְּאִין וכ׳ (ed. Dehr. מִיטַּ׳) are fit to become unclean and to make unclean. Ib. ומיט׳ מאחוריהן ואינן מיט׳ וכ׳ Mish. ed. (Talm. ed. מִטַּ׳) may be made unclean through their backs (touching uncleanness), &c. Ib. VI, 4 ונִטְמְאוּ and which became unclean; a. v. fr.—Yoma 38ᵇ [read:] בא לִטַּמֵּא פְּתָחִין לו (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note) to him who is willing to defile himself, doors are open; Sabb. 104ᵃ; Ab. Zar. 55ᵃ; Men. 29ᵇ
    • 2. to make one’s self unclean by handling a corpse &c. (v. Lev. XXI, 1, sq.). Yeb. 60ᵃ מִטַּמֵּא לה he (the priest) may attend to her burial; a. fr. e.g. Leviticus 21:1

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 H2933, 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

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

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