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כִּתִּי

Chittim

BDB lists 3 entries for ‘Chittim’ fuller range ↓

H3794 Strong's Hebrew
Kittîy Transliteration
/kit-tee'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 10 appearances

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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 name כתי centers on the idea of “Chittim.” Debuting at Genesis 10:4, it then recurs through the corpus. Spanning 8 verses in 7 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 2 of 8 verses. Dig into 8-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Chittim
Modern gloss
Chittim
Strong's 1890 agrees
Strong's 1890 and current BDB scholarship align on this entry's primary sense — a good signal that the gloss above is unambiguous and stable. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H3794 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 →

8
distinct verses
The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
7 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
Genesis 10:4
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Genesis 10:4.
Daniel 11:30
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Daniel 11:30.
#2,342
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,342 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 2 · 25%
  • Historical 1 · 13%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 5 · 63%

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 8 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 50%
  • Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 25%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 25%

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: Chittim 6×, Kittim 2×
  • American Standard Version: Kittim 8×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Cyprus 5×, Kittites 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Kittim 7×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H3794 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Chittim” 6×
  • “Kittim” 2×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H3794 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Kittim” 8×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H3794 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Cyprus” 5×
  • “Kittites” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H3794 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Kittim” 7×

Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.


Senses in BDB

The 3 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.

  1. Chittim or Kittim = "bruisers"
  2. a general term for all islanders of the Mediterranean Sea
  3. the descendants of Javan, the son of Japheth and grandson of Noah

Word origin

[ כִּתִּי ] adj.gent. alw. pl.; usu. as n.gent. = Cypriotes

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Origin: patrial from an unused name denoting Cyprus (only in the pl.)

Part of speech: Adjective


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms H3794 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
כִּתִּ֖ים Noun, Proper Genesis 10:4 3
כִּתִּים֙ Noun, Proper Daniel 11:30 2
כִתִּיִּים֙ Noun, Proper Jeremiah 2:10 1
כִּתִּ֔ים Noun, Proper Numbers 24:24 1
כִּתִּיִּֽים Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Ezekiel 27:6 1
כתיים Noun, Proper Isaiah 23:12 1
כתים Noun, Gentilic, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Ezekiel 27:6 1

Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Chittim). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.

Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897

Or Kittim, a plural form (Gen. 10:4), the name of a branch of the descendants of Javan, the "son" of Japheth. Balaam foretold (Num. 24:24) "that ships shall come from the coast of Chittim, and afflict Eber." Daniel prophesied (11:30) that the ships of Chittim would come against the king of the north. It probably denotes Cyprus, whose ancient capital was called Kition by the Greeks.

The references elsewhere made to Chittim (Isa. 23:1, 12; Jer. 2:10; Ezek. 27:6) are to be explained on the ground that while the name originally designated the Phoenicians only, it came latterly to be used of all the islands and various settlements on the sea-coasts which they had occupied, and then of the people who succeeded them when the Phoenician power decayed. Hence it designates generally the islands and coasts of the Mediterranean and the races that inhabit them.

Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.