כָּנָה
to surname
‘to surname’ 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
- 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”).
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 3 times (75%)
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3655 appears — 4 distinct verses across 2 books. 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.
Job 2 verses
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 44:5 יְכַנֶּֽה Piel impf 3ms One shall say, I am Yahweh's; and another shall call [himself] by the name of Jacob; and another shall subscribe with his hand to Yahweh, and surname [himself] by the name of Israel.
- Isaiah 45:4 אֲכַנְּ/ךָ֖ Piel impf 1cs + sfx pers 2ms For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel my chosen, I have called you by your name: I have surnamed you, though you have not known me.
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.
כנה (kânâh) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to surname.” It occurs a mere 4 verses across Scripture. It clusters heavily in Job, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Job 32:21. Across 2 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Piel, Pual). The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3655 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 50%
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: Give flattering titles 1×, I have surnamed 1×, Let me give flattering titles 1×
- American Standard Version: Give flattering titles 1×, I have surnamed 1×, Surname 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Flatter 1×, I flatter 1×, I have given you a title of honor 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Give a title 1×, Giving titles 1×, He will surname 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3655 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3655 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3655 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3655 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 Pual (the passive of Piel).
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 2 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.
Piel
- . I have called thee by thy name, given thee a title
Pual
- . he is betitled
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
[ כָּנָה ] vb. Pi. betitle, title, give an epithet or cognomen
— 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.
כִּנָּה
- , v. כִּינָּה
כַּנָּה
- (v. כֵּן II)
- 1. base, stand. Kel. VII, 6 נותן את חכ׳ וכ׳ he places the base of a stove between them; [oth. opin. he puts a ruler between, measuring a straight line.]
- 2. ruler or ruled material. Ib. XII, 8, v. כֵּן II.
כָּנָה
- , Pi. כִּינָּה, v. כני.
כני
- , Pi. כִּנָּה, כִּינָּה (b. h., v. כֵּן I)
- 1. to qualify, define; to surname, to nickname; to modify an expression, circumscribe; to compare. B. Mets. 58ᵇ המְכַנֶּה שם רע וכ׳ he who calls his neighbor by a nickname. Shebu. 36ᵃ כַּנֵּה circumscribe (use the third person as euphemism). Sifré Num. 84, a. fr. כי׳ הכתוב the Bible modifies the expression (to avoid anthropomorphism, e.g. Zech. II, 12 עינו for עיני). Meg. IV, 9 המבנה בעריות he who modifies (symbolizes) in translating the laws of incest (e.g. Lev. XVIII, 7, ‘uncover not thy parents’ weakness or disgrace’). Yalk. Num. 771, v. פּוֹלְיָיטוֹן; a. fr. Part. pass. מְכוּנֶּה. Tanḥ. Ki Thissa 17 (ref. to באדם, Ps. LXVIII, 19) מכ׳ משה באדם (not לאדם) the name of Moses is here disguised by the substitute Adam.—[Yalk. Ps. 832 מכונה, v. כָּנַן.] e.g. Zechariah 2:12
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 4 distinct written forms H3655 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| אֲכַנְּ/ךָ֖ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Isaiah 45:4 | 1 |
| אֲכַנֶּ֑ה | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Job 32:22 | 1 |
| אֲכַנֶּֽה | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Job 32:21 | 1 |
| יְכַנֶּֽה | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Isaiah 44:5 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3655, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
