יָתוֹם
orphan
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H3490 appears in the Book of Zechariah — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Zechariah
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.
יתום — transliterated yâthôwm — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “orphan.” Debuting at Exodus 22:22, it then recurs through the corpus. It appears 42 verses across 12 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its moderately common vocabulary. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Deuteronomy. Related forms include יתמה. See the sense tree, 42-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3490 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 →
- 42
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 42 distinct verses.
- 12 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 12 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #864
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 864 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 42 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 11 verses 26%
- Psalms 8 verses 19%
- Job 7 verses 17%
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 42 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 17 verses · 40%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 13 verses · 31%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 12 verses · 29%
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: Fatherless 33×, Fatherless children 2×
- American Standard Version: Fatherless 26×, Shall be for the sojourner for the fatherless 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fatherless 33×, Orphans 3×, Or the fatherless 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Fatherless 22×, Orphan 8×, Orphans 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3490 across 42 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H3490 across 42 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 14 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 H3490 across 42 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H3490 across 42 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 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.
- an orphan, fatherless
Word origin
n.[m.] orphan (NH id.; Aramaic יַתְמָא, ܝܰܬܡܳܐ; Ph. יתם; Arabic يَتِيمٌ pupil, orphan)—יָתוֹם Ex 22:21 + 29 times; pl. יְתוֹמִים v 23 + 8 times; sf. יְתֹמֶיךָ Je 49:11; יְתֹמָיו Is 9:16; לִיתוֹמָיו ψ 109:12;—orphan, i.e. fatherless (‖ אַלְמָנָה) Ex 22:23 ψ 109:9 La 5:3 (‖ אֵין אָב); Jb 24:9 ψ 109:12; prob. also Ex 22:21 Dt 10:18; 14:29; 16:11, 14; 24:17, 19, 20, 21; 26:12, 13; 27:19 ψ 94:6; 146:9 Je 7:6; 22:3 Zc 7:10 Mal 3:5 (in all these, mentioned as helpless, exposed to injury, ‖ אַלְמָנָה and גֵּר); similarly, ‖ אַלְמָנָה Jb 22:9; 24:3; 29:12; 31:17 ψ 68:6 Is 1:17, 23; 9:16; 10:2 Je 49:11 Ez 22:7; without אלמנה Ho 14:4 Jb 6:27; 31:21 ψ 10:14, 18 Pr 23:10 Je 5:28 (in no case clear that both parents are dead).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to be lonely
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.
יָתוֹם
- (b. h.) [by one’s self, cmp. גּוּף, גַּף I,] single, alone, forsaken. Ḥag. 3ᵇ; Mekh. Bo s. 16, a. e. אין הדור י׳ וכ׳ that generation is not forsaken in which &c.—אמן י׳, v. אָמֵן.—Esp.
- 1. fatherless, orphan, public charge. Meg. 13ᵃ המגדל י׳ וי׳ בתוך ביתו וכ׳ he who rears a male or female orphan in his house, is regarded as the parent. Tosef. Keth. VI, 8 י׳ וי׳ צריכין פרנסה מפרנסין את היתומה וכ׳ if an orphan boy and an orphan girl need public support, we must support the girl first &c.; Keth. 67ᵃ. Taan. 24ᵃ בי׳ וי׳ we were engaged in collecting for an orphaned couple to be married; a. v. fr.—יתומה בחיי האב self-depending in her father’s life-time, i.e. a minor over whom her father has no control, e.g. when he has given her away in marriage, and she being divorced or widowed returns to her paternal home. Yeb. XIII, 6. Keth. 73ᵇ; a. fr.
- 2. an animal whose mother died during or soon after childbirth. Bekh. IX, 4. Ḥull. 38ᵇ
- 3. (Law) a minor heir whom the authorities must protect by appointing a guardian to plead his cause &c.; in gen. heir (mostly in the plural).—Pl. יְתוֹמִים, יְתוֹמִין; f. יְתוֹמוֹת. B. Mets. 70ᵃ מעות של י׳ minor heirs’ funds. B. Bath. 124ᵃ שבח שהשביחו י׳ לאחר וכ׳ improvements which the heirs made after their father’s death (before division). Arakh. VI, 1 (21ᵇ) שום הי׳ the assessment for public sale of minors’ (heirs’) property which the court sells to satisfy the decedent’s creditors. Gitt. V, 1; a. fr.—Yeb. XIII, 7 שתי אחיות י׳ two orphan sisters; a. fr.
יָתוֹם ²
- Targ. Y. Ex. XXII, 21 (O. יִתַּם).—Pl. יְתוֹמֵי. Targ. Job XXII, 9.—Fem. יְתוֹמְתָּא. Lev. R. s. 37 (some ed. יְתִימְתָּא).—V. יִתַּם.
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 32 distinct written forms H3490 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3490, 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.
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 38 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 42 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
- Exodus 22:22
- Deuteronomy 10:18
- Job 6:27
- Psalms 68:5
- Proverbs 23:10
- Isaiah 1:17
- Jeremiah 5:28
- Lamentations 5:3
- Ezekiel 22:7
- Hosea 14:3
- Zechariah 7:10
- Malachi 3:5
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.
