מְדִינָה
province
‘province’ is one of 3 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
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 H4082 appears in the Book of Daniel — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Daniel
- Daniel 8:2 הַ/מְּדִינָ֑ה ptcl def.art + n c fs I saw in the vision; now it was so, that when I saw, I was in Shushan the palace, which is in the province of Elam; and I saw in the vision, and I was by the river Ulai.
- Daniel 11:24 מְדִינָה֮ n c fs In time of security shall he come even on the fattest places of the province; and he shall do that which his fathers have not done, nor his fathers' fathers; he shall scatter among them prey, and spoil, and substance: yes, he shall devise his devices against the strongholds, even for a time.
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.
מדינה (mᵉdîynâh) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “province.” Esther dominates its distribution — 26 of 40 verses. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 40 verses — moderately common. Not a single-sense word: explore its full sense range. Its English rendering has broadened — “provinces” classically, “province” (unfoldingWord Literal Text) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4082 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 →
- 40
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 40 distinct verses.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #709
- by frequency
- Top 1000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 709 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 40 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 40 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 35 verses · 88%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 13%
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: Provinces 19×, Every province 8×, Province 7×
- American Standard Version: Provinces 13×, Every province 8×, Province 7×
- Berean Standard Bible: Provinces 22×, Province 12×, District 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Province 24×, Provinces of 11×, Provinces 10×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4082 across 44 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4082 across 44 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4082 across 44 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 9 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4082 across 53 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 4 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. districts of realm of Ahab with שׂרים over them 1 K 20:14, 15, 17, 19. e.g. 1 Kings 20:14
- 2. of the Babylonian empire: Ez 19:8; Dn 8:2 (of Elam); שָׂרָתִי בַּמְּדִינוֹת princess among the provinces La 1:1 (of Judea). e.g. Ezekiel 19:8
- 3. of the Persian empire Est 1:1 + often; one of which was Palestine, Ne 1:3; the returning exiles, בְּנֵי הַמְּדִינָה children of the province Ezr 2:1 Ne 7:6, having רָאשֵׁי הַמְּדִינָה Ne 11:3. e.g. Esther 1:1
- 4. provinces in general Ec 2:8; 5:7; בְּמִשְׁמַנֵּי מְדִינָה in the fat places of the province Dn 11:24 (fertile regions, prob. Egypt; other trans. vid. in Bev.) e.g. Ecclesiastes 2:8
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. province (an Aramaic word, cf. Syriac ܡܕܝܺܢܻܬܳܐ, Arabicمَدِينَةٌ city) cf. also Old Aramaic מדינתא city, Palm. מדיתא city, sf. מדיתהון, pl. מדינתא SAC70 Lzb306 Cooke 266. Est 1:1 + 28 times; pl. מְדִינוֹת 1 K 20:14 + 23 times;—a district of an empire,
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from דין (dîyn) (H1777) — to judge.
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.
דִּינָה
- (b. h.) Dinah, daughter of Jacob. B. Bath. 15ᵇ; a. fr.
מְדִינָה
- [jurisdiction,] district, country. Maas. Sh. III, 4 (contrad. to Jerusalem). R. Hash. IV, 3; Succ. III, 12 (contrad. to the Sanctuary); a. fr.—In gen. province; large town, capital. Pes. 51ᵃ כל המ׳ all the people of the place. Gen. R. s. 50, end, v. עִירוֹנִי. Esth. R. to I, 1 כל מקום שנ׳ … עיר מ׳ מ׳ אפרכיה wherever ʿir is used in the Scriptures, it means a capital, wherever m’dinah is used, it means an hyparchia (province); a. fr.
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 32 distinct written forms H4082 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 H4082, 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
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 → Showing 4 of 8 — 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 36 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 40 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.
