מַגֵּפָה
plague
also: blow, slaughter, pestilence, strike 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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4046 appears in the Book of 2 Chronicles — 1 distinct verse. 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.
2 Chronicles
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.
The Hebrew noun מגפה centers on the idea of “plague.” Alongside “plague” the lexicon also lists “blow”, “slaughter”, and “pestilence” — part of its full sense range. It turns up in 25 verses across 9 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Numbers (36%), then 2 Samuel and Zechariah. Its earliest occurrence is Exodus 9:14. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4046 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 →
- 25
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 25 distinct verses.
- 9 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 9 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,251
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,251 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 25 occurrences in the concordance →
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 25 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 10 verses · 40%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 10 verses · 40%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 5 verses · 20%
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: Plague 16×, Shall be the plague 2×, Slaughter 2×
- American Standard Version: Plague 16×, Shall be the plague 2×, Slaughter 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Plague 17×, Slaughter 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Plague 19×, A 2×, Slaughter 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4046 across 26 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4046 across 26 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4046 across 25 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4046 across 29 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 the full BDB
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 3 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
- 1. blow, = fatal stroke Ez 24:16; in divine judgment (plague) Ex 9:14 (J). e.g. Ezekiel 24:16
- 2. slaughter in battle, 1 S 4:17; 2 S 17:9; 18:7. e.g. 1 Samuel 4:17
- 3. plague, pestilence (divine judgment), of tumours on Philistines 1 S 6:4; against Isr Nu 14:37; 17:13, 14, 15; 25:8, 9, 18, 19; 31:16 2 S 24:21, 25 (ins. also v 15 𝔊 Th We Klo Dr Kit Bu), 1 Ch 21:22 ψ 106:29, 30; specif. disease of bowels 2 Ch 21:14; מ׳ = infected people 1 Ch 21:17; wasting of flesh, eyes and tongue, of hostile peoples Zc 14:12, 18; attacking beasts v 15(×2). e.g. 1 Samuel 6:4
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
n.f. blow, slaughter, plague, pestilence;—מ׳ abs. Nu 14:37 + 23 times; cstr. מַגֵּפַת Zc 14:15; pl. sf. מַגֵּפֹתַי Ex 9:14;—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נגף (nâgaph) (H5062) — to strike.
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.
מַגֵּפָה
- [striking,]
- 1. wound. Makhsh. VI, 8 דם מַגֵּפָתָהּ the blood flowing from a woman’s wound. Nidd. 55ᵇ; Ker. 13ᵃ. Ḥull. 35ᵇ. Yalk. Num. 710; a. e.
- 2. sudden death, plague. Mekh. B’shall. s. 2 אין הממה אלא מ׳ the verb המם (Ex. XIV, 24) means pestilence. M. Kat. 28ᵃ מיתת מ׳ a sudden death. Ber. 4ᵇ בשעת המ׳ during an epidemic; a. fr.—[מגפות, Mekh. l. c., v. מְנָפָה a. סִגְנוֹן.] e.g. Exodus 14:24
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 18 distinct written forms H4046 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4046, 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 22 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 25 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
- Exodus 9:14
- Numbers 14:37
- 1 Samuel 4:17
- 2 Samuel 17:9
- 1 Chronicles 21:17
- 2 Chronicles 21:14
- Psalms 106:29
- Ezekiel 24:16
- Zechariah 14:12
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.
