מֶ֫גֶד
excellence
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 5 times (63%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (25%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4022 appears — 7 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.
Deuteronomy 4 verses
- Deuteronomy 33:13 מִ/מֶּ֤גֶד prep + n c ms cs Of Joseph he said, Blessed of Yahweh be his land, For the precious things of the heavens, for the dew, For the deep that couches beneath,
- Deuteronomy 33:14 וּ/מִ/מֶּ֖גֶד וּ/מִ/מֶּ֖גֶד conj + prep + n c ms cs conj + prep + n c ms cs For the precious things of the fruits of the sun, For the precious things of the growth of the moons,
- Deuteronomy 33:15 וּ/מִ/מֶּ֖גֶד conj + prep + n c ms cs For the chief things of the ancient mountains, For the precious things of the everlasting hills,
- Deuteronomy 33:16 וּ/מִ/מֶּ֗גֶד conj + prep + n c ms cs For the precious things of the earth and the fullness of it, The good will of him who lived in the bush. Let [the blessing] come on the head of Joseph, On the crown of the head of him who was separate from his brothers.
Song of Solomon 3 verses
- Song of Solomon 4:13 מְגָדִ֑ים n c mp Your shoots are an orchard of pomegranates, with precious fruits: Henna with spikenard plants,
- Song of Solomon 4:16 מְגָדָֽי/ו n c mp cs + sfx pers 3ms Awake, north wind; and come, you south; Blow on my garden, that its spices may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, And taste his precious fruits. Lover
- Song of Solomon 7:13 מְגָדִ֔ים n c mp The mandrakes give forth fragrance. At our doors are all kinds of precious fruits, new and old, Which I have stored up for you, my beloved.
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, מגד (meged) means “excellence.” The word gravitates to Deuteronomy (57%), then Song of Solomon. It turns up in 7 verses across 2 books, an uncommon footprint. Scripture first uses it in Deuteronomy 33:13. It shares a root with מגדנה and מגדיאל. Dig into 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4022 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 7 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 4 verses 57%
- Song of Solomon 3 verses 43%
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 7 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 4 verses · 57%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 43%
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: Precious things 4×, Pleasant 2×
- American Standard Version: Precious things 4×, Precious 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Choicest 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bounty of 5×, Delicious 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4022 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4022 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4022 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 6 renderings that appear 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 H4022 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.
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.
- excellence
Word origin
Origin: from an unused root probably meaning to be eminent
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.
מֶגֶד
- , as מֶמֶר fr. מָרַר; cmp. גָּד fortune) [allotted gift,] precious goods, esp. fine fruit.—Pl. מְגָדִים. Sabb. 127ᵇ מיני מ׳ all sorts of delicacies.
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 6 distinct written forms H4022 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וּ/מִ/מֶּ֖גֶד | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 33:14 | 3 |
| וּ/מִ/מֶּ֗גֶד | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 33:16 | 1 |
| מְגָדִ֑ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 4:13 | 1 |
| מְגָדִ֔ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 7:13 | 1 |
| מְגָדָֽי/ו | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct | Song of Solomon 4:16 | 1 |
| מִ/מֶּ֤גֶד | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Deuteronomy 33:13 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4022, 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.
Derived from this word
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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
