מָהַהּ
to delay
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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Hithpael
- The reflexive or reciprocal stem (the subject acts on itself).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- 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.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4102 appears in the Book of Habakkuk — 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.
Habakkuk
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.
“to delay” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb מהה (mâhahh). First canonically at Genesis 19:16, it enters the text early. It turns up in 9 verses across 7 books, an uncommon footprint. From the same root come מה, מא and מדוע. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4102 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 →
- 9
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,481
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 9 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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 56%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 3 verses · 33%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 11%
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: Tarry 2×
- American Standard Version: Tarry 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Delay 1×, Delayed 1×, Hesitated 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Delay 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4102 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 7 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 H4102 across 9 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 H4102 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4102 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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.
- (Hithpalpel) to linger, tarry, wait, delay
Word origin
[ מָהַהּ ] vb. only Hithpalp. linger, tarry
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מה (mâh) (H4100) — what.
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.
מָהָה
- , Pi. מִיהָה, מִיהֵא (v. מָחָה) to dissolve, dilute; (of clothes) to make threadbare and ragged.—Part. pass. מְהוּהֶא, f. מְהוּהָא, מְהוּהָה. Toh. IX, 9 מטלות מהוהה ed. Dehr. (oth. ed. … הא) a tattered (scorched) piece of cloth; Nidd. 56ᵃ מטלית המהוהא; ib. 4ᵃ המהומה׳ (corr. acc.). Kel. XXIV, 17 מהוהה שטלייה וכ׳ a threadbare shred patched on a sound one (בְּרִיָּיה, v. בָּרִיא).
- to be tattered, fall to pieces. Ib. XXVII, 12 ed. Dehr. נמהא, Mish. ed. נמהה; Talm. ed. נמחה).
- to dissolve; to crumble, sift. Maas. Sh. V, 1 מַמְהֶה ושופך Ar. (ed. pr. מַמְהֶא; ed. ממחה) he dissolves (the lime) and pours it over the spot; B. Kam. 69ᵃ ממהה Ms. R. (ed. … חה). Zeb. 54ᵃ מביא סיד … וממהא וכ׳ Ar. (ed. וממחה) takes lime, molten lead and pitch and mixes them and pours &c. Ohol. XVIII, 4 וממהה ed. Dehr. (Ar. וממהא, ed. … חה) and crumbles (and sifts the earth).
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 9 distinct written forms H4102 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הִֽתְמַהְמְהָ֑/ם | Verb, Hithpalpel, Infinitive Construct | Judges 3:26 | 1 |
| הִתְמַהְמְה֣וּ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Isaiah 29:9 | 1 |
| הִתְמַהְמָ֑הְנוּ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural | Genesis 43:10 | 1 |
| הִתְמַהְמָ֑הְתִּי | Verb, Hithpalpel, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Psalms 119:60 | 1 |
| וְ/הִֽתְמַהְמְה֖וּ | Verb, Hithpael, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Plural | Judges 19:8 | 1 |
| וַֽ/יִּתְמַהְמָ֓הּ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Genesis 19:16 | 1 |
| יִתְמַהְמָהּ֙ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Habakkuk 2:3 | 1 |
| לְ/הִתְמַהְמֵ֔הַּ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Infinitive Construct | Exodus 12:39 | 1 |
| מִתְמַהְמֵ֔הַּ | Verb, Hithpalpel, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Samuel 15:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4102, 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
- מא mâʼ H3964 what
- מדוע maddûwaʻ H4069 why
- מדי madday H4078 what is enough, sufficiency, enough
- מה mâh H4101 whatever
- מי mîy H4310 who
- מן mân H4478 manna
- מתלאה mattᵉlâʼâh H4972 weariness
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 10 — 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 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.
