כָּפַן
to hunger
also: be hungry, hungrily desire 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”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3719 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.
Ezekiel 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.
כפן — transliterated kâphan — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to hunger.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Ezekiel. It occurs only once, in Ezekiel 17:7. The lexical range runs to 2 senses — “to hunger” plus “be hungry” and “hungrily desire”. 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 H3719 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
- Ezekiel 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Did bend 1×
- American Standard Version: Behold this vine did bend 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Bent 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Toward 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3719 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3719 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3719 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3719 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- (Qal) to hunger, be hungry, hungrily desire
- (CLBL) to twist, bend
Word origin
[ כָּפַן ] vb. be hungry, hunger, perh. also hungrily desire;—only Qal Ez 17:7
— 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.
כָּפַן
- to bend; part. pass. כָּפוּן bent upon, eager for. Gen. R. s. 79, beg. (ref. to Job V, 22) זה לבן שבא כ׳ וכ׳ that refers to Laban who rushed with eagerness at his (Jacob’s) money to plunder it. e.g. Job 5:22
כְּפַן I
- same
- 1. to bend.—Part. pass. כָּפִין. Targ. Job XL, 17 (ed. Lag. כפיף, ed. Wil. כפף, Ms. כאיף; h. text יחפץ).
- 2. to pine (for food), to starve. Targ. Ps. XXXIV, 11. Targ. Gen. XLI, 55; a. fr.—Ber. 62ᵇ (prov.) עד דכַפְנַת אכול eat while thou art hungry (delay nothing). Pes. 107ᵇ bot. כי היכי דאגיר׳ ואִכְפַן אמצה וכ׳ Ms. M. (read: דאיגרר, v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note; ed. דניגרריה לליביה) that I may get an appetite and be eager for the Matsah in the evening. B. Mets. 83ᵃ וכְפִינָן and we are hungry; a. fr.—[Esth. R. to I, 4 כַּפְנָאִי I am hungry (?).]
- to cause to hunger. Targ. Deut. VIII, 3; a. e.—Sabb. 33ᵃ מַכְפֵּין נפשיה he starved himself (and grew sick in consequence).
כְּפַן II
- (preced.) hunger, famine. Targ. Ruth I, 1. Targ. Gen. XII, 10; a. fr.—Sabb. 33ᵃ נפיחי כ׳ swelling (and lying) from starvation.—Taan. 19ᵇ top, v. בַּצּוֹרְתָא. Ib. 8ᵇ כ׳ ומותנא famine and pestilence; a. fr.—Pl. כַּפְנִין. Targ. Ruth. l. c.—V. כְּפֵינֵי.
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3719, 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 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.
