Want to remove ads? Support Godless Engineer

מְא֫וּמָה

anything

H3972 Strong's Hebrew
mᵉʼûwmâh Transliteration
/meh-oo'-maw/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 32 appearances

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.

“anything” is the headline sense of the Hebrew word מאומה (mᵉʼûwmâh). Translators differ — “any thing” in the King James Version, then “anything” (Berean Standard Bible), as the renderings breakdown shows. It turns up in 32 verses across 12 books, a moderately common footprint. It concentrates in 1 Samuel, which alone accounts for 28% of its uses. First canonically at Genesis 22:12, it enters the text early. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
fault
Modern gloss
anything
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H3972 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 →

32
distinct verses
The word appears in 32 distinct verses.
12 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 12 of 39 Old Testament books.
Genesis 22:12
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Genesis 22:12.
Jonah 3:7
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Jonah 3:7.
#1,086
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,086 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 32 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 9 · 28%
  • Historical 16 · 50%
  • Wisdom 4 · 13%
  • Prophets 3 · 9%

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 32 distinct verses.

  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 18 verses · 56%
  • Torah (Pentateuch) 9 verses · 28%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 16%

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: Any thing 11×, Nothing 4×, Ought 3×
  • American Standard Version: Anything 10×, Nothing 4×, Aught 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Anything 8×, Nothing 3×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Anything 26×, And 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H3972 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Any thing” 11×
  • “Nothing” 4×
  • “Ought” 3×
  • “Is nothing” 2×

Plus 12 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.

American Standard Version Public Domain

Renders H3972 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anything” 10×
  • “Nothing” 4×
  • “Aught” 3×
  • “Is nothing” 2×
  • “Was nothing” 2×

Plus 11 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 H3972 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anything” 8×
  • “Nothing” 3×

Plus 6 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 15 further occurrences.

unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Renders H3972 across 32 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Anything” 26×
  • “And” 2×

Plus 4 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 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.

  1. anything

Word origin

pron.indef. anything (according to Thes from מָה וּמָה, like quidquid, against which is the Mil‘el tone; according to Ol254, 255, 386 Köii. 146 an old accus. from מאוּם in sense of speck, particle, cf. Fr point: in Assyrian manman (proposes who? who?), assim. mamman, or manma (man, who? + generalizing ma), mamma, is any one, minma (min, what? + ma), mimma, is anything, Dl§ 60,DlHWB 418 f. WSG 125 f.);—anything, usually in negative sentences, as Gn 22:12 ואל־תעשׂ לו מאומה (euphem. for something bad), 30:31 לֹא־תִתֶּן־לִי מאומה, 39:6, 9; 40:15 (euphem.), 1 S 12:4, 5; 20:26, 39; 25:7, 15, 21; 29:3 etc., Ju 14:6 ומאומה אין בידו, Ec 5:14 ומ׳ לא ישׂא בעמלו, 1 K 18:43 אין מ׳ lit. nought of anything! Je 39:12 ואל תעשׂ לו מאומה רָּע; strengthened by כֹּל †Gn 39:23; 2 S 3:35; after אִם = surely not, 2 S 3:35; in interrog. sentence Nu 22:38; in affirm. sentence Dt 24:10 כִּי־תַשֶּׁה בֳרֵעֲךָ מַשַּׁאת מ׳ a pledge of (= consisting in) anything, 2 S 13:2 (euphem.), 2 K 5:20 (var. מוּמָח). Adverbially, 1 S 21:3 אישׁ אל ידע מ׳ את הדבר let no one know of the matter in anything at all.

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

Derived from מאום (mʼûwm) (H3971) — blemish.

TWOT: 1136


Forms in the corpus

The 12 distinct written forms H3972 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
מְא֔וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Genesis 30:31 9
מְא֑וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Deuteronomy 24:10 6
מְאֽוּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Ecclesiastes 5:14 6
לִ/מְאֽוּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 Kings 10:21 2
מְא֖וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Deuteronomy 13:17 2
וּ/מְא֖וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Judges 14:6 1
וּ/מְא֨וּמָה֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Ecclesiastes 5:15 1
מְא֑וּמָּה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Genesis 22:12 1
מְא֗וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Ecclesiastes 9:5 1
מְא֛וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 Samuel 21:2 1
מְא֣וּמָה Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Jeremiah 39:12 1
מְא֨וּמָה֙ Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute Genesis 39:23 1

Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 32 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 32 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.