יִדְּעֹנִי
soothsayer
‘soothsayer’ is one of 2 main senses 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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3049 appears in the Book of Leviticus — 3 distinct verses. 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.
Leviticus
- Leviticus 19:31 הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִ֔ים ptcl def.art + n c mp "'Don't turn to those who are mediums, nor to the wizards. Don't seek them out, to be defiled by them. I am Yahweh your God.
- Leviticus 20:6 הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִ֔ים ptcl def.art + n c mp "'The person that turns to those who are mediums, and to the wizards, to play the prostitute after them, I will even set my face against that person, and will cut him off from among his people.
- Leviticus 20:27 יִדְּעֹנִ֖י n c ms "'A man or a woman that is a medium, or is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones; their blood shall be upon them.'"
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.
“soothsayer” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun ידעני (yiddᵉʻônîy). Where the King James Version says “wizards,” newer translations reach for “spiritists” (Berean Standard Bible) and “familiar spirits” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. It appears 11 verses across 6 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Leviticus. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. See the sense tree, 11-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3049 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 →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 6 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 6 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,210
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,210 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 11 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 11 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 6 verses · 55%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 36%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 9%
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: Wizards 8×
- American Standard Version: Wizards 9×
- Berean Standard Bible: Spiritists 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Familiar spirits 6×, Spiritists 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3049 across 11 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3049 across 11 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3049 across 11 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 H3049 across 11 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.
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.
- a knower, one who has a familiar spirit
- a familiar spirit, soothsayer, necromancer (metonymy)
Word origin
n.m. familiar spirit (proposes either as knowing, wise (acquainted with secrets of unseen world), Ew vielwisserisch; or as intimate acquaintance of soothsayer, v. RS JPh. xiv. 1885. 127)—abs. יִדְּעֹנִי Dt 18:11 + 2 times; pl. יִדְּעֹנִים 1 S 28:3 + 6 times; הַיִּדְּעֹנִי מִן 1 S 28:9, read הַיִּדְּעֹנִים מִן (v. 𝔊 Th We Klo Dr); familiar spirit, always ‖ אוֹב, אֹבוֹת 1 S 28:3, 9 Is 8:19; 19:3 2 K 21:6 (עשׂה אוֹב; ‖ נִחֵשׁ, עוֹנֵן) = 2 Ch 33:6, 2 K 23:24 Lv 19:31; 20:6, 27 (all H; on last two cf. Acts 16:16 and Dr Dt 18:11), (‖ אוֹב + דֹּרֵשׁ אֶל־הַמֵּתִים).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ידע (yâdaʻ) (H3045) — to know.
Forms in the corpus
The 9 distinct written forms H3049 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 8:19 | 3 |
| הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִ֖י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 28:9 | 1 |
| הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 1 Samuel 28:3 | 1 |
| הַ/יִּדְּעֹנִֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Isaiah 19:3 | 1 |
| הַ֠/יִּדְּעֹנִים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Kings 23:24 | 1 |
| וְ/יִדְּעֹנִ֑ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | 2 Kings 21:6 | 1 |
| וְ/יִדְּעֹנִ֔י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 18:11 | 1 |
| וְ/יִדְּעוֹנִ֑י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Chronicles 33:6 | 1 |
| יִדְּעֹנִ֖י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 20:27 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3049, 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
- דע dêaʻ H1843 knowledge
- דעת daʻath H1847 knowledge
- ידע yᵉdaʻ H3046 to know
- מדע maddâʻ H4093 knowledge
- מודע môwdaʻ H4129 kinsman
- מודעת môwdaʻath H4130 kindred
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
- דעואל Dᵉʻûwʼêl H1845 Deuel
- ידוע Yaddûwaʻ H3037 Jaddua
- ידיעאל Yᵉdîyʻăʼêl H3043 Jediael
- ידע Yâdâʻ H3047 Jada
- ידעיה Yᵉdaʻyâh H3048 Jedaiah
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. 5 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 11 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 11 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.
