Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

אֵיתָנִים

Ethanim

BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Ethanim’ fuller range ↓

H388 Strong's Hebrew
ʼÊythânîym Transliteration
/ay-thaw-neem'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 1 appearance

Compare with another word →

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.

At its core, איתנים (ʼÊythânîym) means “Ethanim.” With only 1 verse it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to 1 Kings (100%). It occurs only once, in 1 Kings 8:2. Dig into 1-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
Ethanim
Modern gloss
Ethanim
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 H388 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.
1 Kings 8:2
only appearance
This word occurs only once, in 1 Kings 8:2.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 1 · 100%
  • Wisdom 0 · 0%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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: Ethanim 1×
  • American Standard Version: Ethanim 1×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Ethanim 1×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ethanim 1×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H388 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethanim” 1×

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H388 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethanim” 1×

Berean Standard Bible Public Domain

Renders H388 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethanim” 1×

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H388 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:

  • “Ethanim” 1×

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.

  1. Ethanim = "enduring"
  2. seventh Jewish month, corresponding to modern Oct. to Nov.; so named because permanent streams still flowed

Word origin

אֵיתָן, אֵתָן adj. perennial, ever-flowing, fig. permanent, as subst, steady flow, permanence

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

Derived from איתן (ʼêythân) (H386) — perpetual.

Part of speech: Proper Name Masculine


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.

אֵיתָן

  • 1. essence, permanent or normal condition. Nidd. 48ᵇ חזר לאֵיתָנוֹ obtained again its normal condition. Sot. 36ᵇ שבה קשתו לא׳ his membrum resumed its normal condition. (Cmp. Ex. XIV, 27). e.g. Exodus 14:27
  • 2. adj. essential, strong. R. Hash. 11ᵃ א׳ לישנא דתקיפי ethan means strong.— Pl. אֵיתָנִים. Ib. אֵיתָנֵי עולם the mighty of the world (patriarchs). Gen. R. s. 98 (play on ăthono Gen. XLIX, 11) בנים אֵתָנִים וכ׳ mighty sons (heroes) are destined to descend from him. e.g. Genesis 49:11
  • 3. pr. n. river Ethan. Succ. 18ᵃ (Ms. M. נתן); a. e.

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 H388, 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.

Derives from

Shares the same root

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.


Bible dictionary

Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Ethanim). 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

The month of gifts, i.e., of vintage offerings; called Tisri after the Exile; corresponding to part of September and October. It was the first month of the civil year, and the seventh of the sacred year (1 Kings 8:2).

Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863

[Month]

Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869

strong; valiant

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


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.

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.