טָנַף
to defile
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
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H2936 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Song of Solomon 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.
At its core, טנף (ṭânaph) means “to defile.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 1 verse. The word gravitates to Song of Solomon (100%). Scripture uses it exactly once, at Song of Solomon 5:3. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H2936 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.
- #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
- Song of Solomon 1 verse 100%
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 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: Shall i defile 1×
- American Standard Version: Shall i defile them 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Soil them again 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Could i get them dirty 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H2936 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H2936 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H2936 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H2936 across 1 tagged occurrence — 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.
- (Piel) to defile, soil
Word origin
[ טָנַף ] vb. soil, defile — Pi. Ct 5:3
— 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.
טָנַף
- to be soiled.
- to soil with excrements, secretions &c.; to secrete (blood or mucus from the womb). Pesik. Par., p. 40ᵇ שטי׳ בפלטין וכ׳ that made a nuisance in the palace &c. Bekh. 20ᵃ, a. e. מְטַנֶּפֶת an animal secreting from the vagina (an evidence of birth or abortion). B. Kam. 3ᵃ טִינְּפָה פירות the animal soiled fruits (by rolling in them). Tosef. Joma V (IV), 5 כדי שלא יְטַנְּפוּ וכ׳ that his feet may not soil his garments; a. fr.—Part. pass. מְטוּנָּף, f. מְטוּנֶּפֶת; pl. מְטוּנָּפִין, מְטוּנָּפוֹת soiled, filthy, defiled, polluted. Y. Snh. X, 27ᵈ top. Cant. R. to II, 8; a. fr.
- , Nif. נִטְנַף to be soiled, defiled. Y. Yoma VIII, 44ᵈ נִיטַּנְּפוּ רגליו (or נִיטְנְפוּ) if his feet became muddy.—*Y. Ber. I, 3ᶜ bot. ראה כפים הללו שלא ניטנפו בבנין וכ׳ ed. Lehm. (ed. Ven. נטפו, ed. Krot. חטפו, v. חָטַף) see these hands which have not been in the least soiled by misappropriating the Temple funds.
טְנַף
- Part. pass. טָנִיף. Sabb. 57ᵃ טְנִיפָן they were soiled with dirt (Rashi: מִיטַּנְּפֵי Ithpa.).
- to soil, pollute. Targ. Cant. V, 3 (ed. Lag. אטופ׳, read: אֲטַנְּפִי׳). Targ. Job III, 5 (v. טְנַן). Targ. Y. Num. XXXV, 33. [Ib. יִטּוֹף; Targ. Y. Deut. XXI, 23 תְטוּפוּן, prob. to be read: יְטַנֵּף, תְטַנְּפוּן.]—Bekh. 20ᵃ ודאי לא ט׳ it has certainly not had any secretion indicative of birth, v. preced.
- to be soiled, defiled. Targ. Lam. IV, 14. Targ. Job. XVIII, 3 (v. טְמַע). Targ. Ps. CVI, 38; a. e.—Sabb. 57ᵃ, v. supra. B. Bath. 82ᵇ קמִיטַּנְּפֵי פירי the fruits are soiled (will rot, when falling on moist plants).
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.
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.
