כָּפָן
hunger
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3720 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Job 2 verses
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.
The Hebrew noun כפן centers on the idea of “hunger.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. Job dominates its distribution — 2 of 2 verses. Its earliest occurrence is Job 5:22. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3720 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 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: Famine 2×
- American Standard Version: Dearth 1×, Famine 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Famine 1×, Hunger 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Famine 1×, Hunger 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3720 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3720 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3720 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3720 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- hunger, famine, painful hunger
Word origin
כָּפָן n.[m.] hunger, famine
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from כפן (kâphan) (H3719) — to hunger.
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.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H3720 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/בְ/כָפָ֗ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 30:3 | 1 |
| וּ/לְ/כָפָ֣ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 5:22 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
