מָא
what
‘what’ is one of 4 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
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Pronoun, Indefinite, Common, Singular 1 time (50%)
- Particle, Interrogative 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H3964 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
1 Kings 1 verse
Ezra 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.
מא (mâʼ) is a Hebrew word most often rendered “what.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. 1 Kings dominates its distribution — 1 of 2 verses. Debuting at 1 Kings 22:22, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 4 senses. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3964 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: What 1×
- American Standard Version: What 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: What 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Is 1×, What 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3964 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3964 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3964 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3964 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 4 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.
- what, whatever
- what?
- whatever, what, whatsoever
- how?, why?, wherefore? (with prefixes)
Word origin
Derived from מה (mâh) (H4100) — what.
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.
מָא
- 1. what? Targ. O. Gen. XXXI, 26 ed. Berl. (mostly מָה, q. v.). מָא אִם, contr. מָאִים what (will happen) if?, suppose, perhaps. Targ. O. Gen. XVIII, 24 מא אם ed. Berl. (oth. ed. a. Y. מאים); a. fr.—מָא דֵין, contr. מָדֵין, מַדֵּין what is this?, why? Targ. I Kings I, 13 (מה) מא דין (ed. Lag. מדין; h. text מדוע). Targ. Jer. XII, 1. Targ. O. Gen. XL, 7 (some ed. מַה דֵּין); a. fr.
- 2. how! Ib. XXVIII, 17 (ed. Berl. מַא, oth. ed. a. Y. מַה).
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 H3964 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בַּ/מָּֽה | Particle, Interrogative | 1 Kings 22:22 | 1 |
| לְ/מָ֣א | Pronoun, Indefinite, Common, Singular | Ezra 6:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H3964, 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
- מדוע maddûwaʻ H4069 why
- מדי madday H4078 what is enough, sufficiency, enough
- מה mâh H4101 whatever
- מהה mâhahh H4102 to delay
- מי mîy H4310 who
- מן mân H4478 manna
- מתלאה mattᵉlâʼâh H4972 weariness
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 → Showing 4 of 10 — not the complete family. 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
