מֵאֵן
refusing
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H3987 appears — 1 distinct verse across 1 book. 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.
Jeremiah 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.
מאן — transliterated mêʼên — is a Hebrew adjective carrying the sense “refusing.” A scarce word — 1 verse in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. A true hapax — its single appearance is Jeremiah 13:10. It shares a root with מאן and מאן. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H3987 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.
- #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
- Jeremiah 1 verse 100%
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 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: Refuse 1×
- American Standard Version: Refuse 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Refuse 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ones who refuse 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H3987 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
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.
- refusing
Word origin
[ מֵאֵן ] adj. id. [ m.ae.ab ], of disobeying י׳ Je 13:10.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מאן (mâʼên) (H3985) — to refuse.
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.
מַאן
- (cmp. מָא) who?, what?, which?; (relat.) who, which. [Targ. מַן.] Sabb. 57ᵃ, a. fr. מ׳ דכר וכ׳, v. דְּכַר I. Yeb. 107ᵇ מ׳ לא הודו לו who is meant by ‘they did not agree with him’? Ib., a. fr. מ׳ תנא who is the authority for the law just quoted?, i.e. whose opinion is here represented?—Ḥull. 50ᵃ אמר מ׳ דהו somebody said; Bets. 27ᵃ; M. Kat. 22ᵃ; (Nidd. 48ᵃ ר׳ זירא). Y. Kil. IX, 32ᵇ פוק חזי מ׳ בעי וכ׳ go out and see who it is that wants thee outside (an intimation of a teacher’s displeasure); Gen. R. s. 33 (some ed. מַן). Ber. 30ᵇ; Ḥull. 7ᵃ חזי מ׳ גברא וכ׳ see how great a man gives testimony about him. Y. Maas. Sh. II, 53ᵇ bot. מ׳ דאמר וכ׳ according to him who says &c.; a. v. fr.—V. מַן.
מָאַן
- , Pi. מֵיאֵן, מֵאֵן (b. h.; v. אֵין) to deny, refuse, esp.
- 1. (of a woman betrothed in childhood, on arriving at majority) to protest against, to annul one’s marriage. Yeb. XIII, 1 אין מְמָאֲנִין אלא ארוסות only betrothed (not married) women may have their obligation cancelled. Ib. מְמָאֶנֶת והיא קטנה וכ׳ she may protest (have her marriage cancelled) even while yet a minor, and even four or five times in succession. Ib. 2 איזו … שצריכה למָאֵן what minor is bound to make declaration (before leaving her husband)?—Ib. 4 הממאנת באיש וכ׳ if a woman refuses her husband by declaration, he is permitted to marry her kindred (who otherwise would be forbidden to him); a. v. fr.
- 2. to advise a protest. Eduy. VI, 1 שמְמָאֲנִים וכ׳ that the court eventually advises women married as minors to protest; Nidd. 8ᵃ; Ber. 27ᵃ.—V. מִיאוּן.
מָאן
- (v. preced.) [thing,]
- 1. vessel, utensil. Targ. Ps. II, 9. Targ. Lev. XI, 33; a. fr. (interch. with מָן, מַן).—B. Kam. 17ᵇ מ׳ תבירא תבר it was a broken vessel he broke. Ib. בתר תבר מ׳ אזלינן we judge by the final cause by which the vessel was broken; a. v. fr.—Pl. מָאנִין, מָאנַיָּא, מָאנֵי, מָנ׳. Targ. Ex. XI, 2; a. fr.—Sabb. 105ᵇ תבר מ׳ תבירי broke broken vessels (pretending to be angry); a. fr.
- 2. (cmp. כֶּלִי) garment, dress. Ib. 113ᵇ; Snh. 94ᵃ קרי למָאנֵיה וכ׳ called his dress (garments) &c., v. כָּבֵד I; B. Kam. 91ᵇ למאני (corr. acc.; v. Rabb. D. S. a. l.).—B. Mets. 47ᵃ במ׳ דכשר למקני ביה (symbolical possession has been given) by means of a garment fit for the purpose; a. fr.—Pl. as ab. Ber. 6ᵃ. Y. Kil. IX, 32ᵇ top; Y. Keth. XII, 35ᵃ top מָאנוֹי, v. בְּזַע; a. fr.
- 3. (= h. קַנְקַן) [handle,] coulter of the plough. B. Mets. 80ᵃ
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 H3987, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
