לַעֲנָה
wormwood
‘wormwood’ 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H3939 appears — 8 distinct verses across 5 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 9:15 לַֽעֲנָ֑ה n c fs therefore thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, Behold, I will feed them, even this people, with wormwood, and give them water of gall to drink.
- Jeremiah 23:15 לַֽעֲנָ֔ה n c fs Therefore thus says Yahweh of Hosts concerning the prophets: Behold, I will feed them with wormwood, and make them drink the water of gall; for from the prophets of Jerusalem is ungodliness gone forth into all the land.
Lamentations 2 verses
Amos 2 verses
- Amos 5:7 לְ/לַעֲנָ֖ה prep + n c fs You who turn justice to wormwood, And cast down righteousness to the earth:
- Amos 6:12 לְ/לַעֲנָֽה prep + n c fs Do horses run on the rocky crags? Does one plow there with oxen? But you have turned justice into poison, And the fruit of righteousness into bitterness;
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.
לענה (laʻănâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “wormwood.” Debuting at Deuteronomy 29:18, it then recurs through the corpus. With 8 verses in 5 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It concentrates in Jeremiah, which alone accounts for 25% of its uses. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3939 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.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 2 verses 25%
- Lamentations 2 verses 25%
- Amos 2 verses 25%
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 8 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 38%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 13%
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: Wormwood 7×
- American Standard Version: Wormwood 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Wormwood 7×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Wormwood 6×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3939 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3939 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3939 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 H3939 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 2 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
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.
- wormwood
- bitterness (metaphorically)
Word origin
n.f. wormwood (NH id.; Arabic لَعْنٌ is curse (vb. لَعَنَ id.), so Nab. לענת (vb. לען) cf. CookGloss.);—only fig. of bitter things:—of perverted justice, Am 5:7; 6:12 (‖ רֹאשׁ); of result of idolatry, Dt 29:17 (‖ id.); of י׳’s chastisement Je 9:14 (‖ מֵי־רֹאשׁ), 23:15 (‖ id.), La 3:15 (‖ מְרוֹרִים), v 19 (‖ רֹאשׁ); sim. of bitter (מָרָה) result of intercourse with strange woman Pr 5:4.—On wormwood (Artemisia absinthium,) etc., Gk. ἀψίνθιον) cf. Löw 80 f. 401, 421 TristrNat. Hist. Bib. 493.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root supposed to mean to curse
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.
לַעֲנָה I
- בֶּן ל׳ Ben La‘anah. Y. Snh. X, 28ᵃ top סיפרי בן ל׳; (Koh. R. to XII, 12 ספר בן תגלא).
לַעֲנָה II
- Arab. la‘an to curse) bitterness; wormwood. Tanḥ. B’shall., ed. Bub., 21; Yalk. Ex. 258, v. גַּד I.
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 8 distinct written forms H3939 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וְ/לַעֲנָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 29:18 | 1 |
| כַֽ/לַּעֲנָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 5:4 | 1 |
| לְ/לַעֲנָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Amos 5:7 | 1 |
| לְ/לַעֲנָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Amos 6:12 | 1 |
| לַֽעֲנָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:15 | 1 |
| לַֽעֲנָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 23:15 | 1 |
| לַעֲנָ֥ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Lamentations 3:19 | 1 |
| לַעֲנָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Lamentations 3:15 | 1 |
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.
