יָטַב
to be good
also: be pleasing, be well, be glad 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘be glad’
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Cohortative
- A first-person volitional form expressing wish or resolve (“let me / let us write”).
- Jussive
- A third- or second-person volitional form expressing wish or command (“let him write”).
State
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H3190 appears in the Book of Nehemiah — 2 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.
Nehemiah
- Nehemiah 2:5 יִיטַ֥ב Qal impf 3ms I said to the king, If it please the king, and if your servant have found favor in your sight, that you would send me to Judah, to the city of my fathers' tombs, that I may build it.
- Nehemiah 2:6 וַ/יִּיטַ֤ב conj + Qal wimpf 3ms The king said to me (the queen also sitting by him), For how long shall your journey be? and when will you return? So it pleased the king to send me; and I set him a time.
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.
יטב — transliterated yâṭab — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to be good.” Where the King James Version says “pleased,” newer translations reach for “and” (unfoldingWord Literal Text); the renderings breakdown has the detail. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 105 verses — common. Debuting at Genesis 4:7, it then recurs through the corpus. Across 2 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Qal, Hithpael). See the sense tree, 105-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3190 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 →
- 105
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 105 distinct verses.
- 26 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 26 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #387
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 387 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 105 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 19 verses 18%
- Jeremiah 16 verses 15%
- Genesis 9 verses 9%
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 105 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 49 verses · 47%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 35 verses · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 21 verses · 20%
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: Pleased 11×, Do good 4×, Well 4×
- American Standard Version: Pleased 7×, Thee 6×, Do good 5×
- Berean Standard Bible: Pleased 5×, Correct 4×, May go well 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 13×, Was good 12×, Do good 11×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3190 across 110 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 66 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 H3190 across 109 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 64 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 H3190 across 110 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 73 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 7 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3190 across 140 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus other, less common renderings. Plus 48 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
9 senses and sub-senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each. This entry also uses Hithpael (reflexive or reciprocal).
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 9 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- 1. be glad, joyful
- 2. be well placed
- 3. impers. be well for or with, go well with
- 4. be pleasing
Hithpael
- 1. make glad, rejoice
- 2. do good to, deal well with
- 3. do well or thoroughly
- 4. make a thing good, right, beautiful
- 5. do well, right, ethically
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
[ יָטַב ] vb. be good, well, glad, pleasing
— 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.
יָטַב
- (v. next w.), part. Hof. מוּטָב, q. v.
יְטַב
- (cmp. טוב) to be good, well. Impf. יֵיטַב. Targ. O. Gen. XII, 13 ed. Berl. (ed. יוֹטִיב, Y. יֵיטִיב). Targ. O. Deut. IV, 40 (Y. יוֹטֵיב); a. fr.
- 1. same, v. supra.—2)
- to do good, be kind. Targ. Gen. XXXII, 10; a. fr.—3) to do a thing well. Targ. I Sam. XVI, 17 מוֹטִיב לנגנא who plays well. Targ. Gen. VI, 7; a. e.
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 82 distinct written forms H3190 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
The 60 most common forms are shown; 22 rarer forms follow in the full concordance.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3190, 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.
Derived from this word
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 2 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 98 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 105 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
- Genesis 4:7
- Exodus 1:20
- Leviticus 5:4
- Numbers 10:29
- Deuteronomy 1:23
- Joshua 22:30
- Judges 17:13
- Ruth 3:1
- 1 Samuel 2:32
- 2 Samuel 3:36
- 1 Kings 1:47
- 2 Kings 9:30
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.
