מָזוֹן
food
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
Grammar key — what these labels mean
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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H4203 appears — 2 distinct verses 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.
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 4:12 וּ/מָז֨וֹן conj + n c ms The leaves of it were beautiful, and the fruit of it much, and in it was food for all: the animals of the field had shadow under it, and the birds of the sky lived in the branches of it, and all flesh was fed from it.
- Daniel 4:21 וּ/מָז֨וֹן conj + n c ms whose leaves were beautiful, and the fruit of it much, and in it was food for all; under which the animals of the field lived, and on whose branches the birds of the sky had their habitation:
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.
“food” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מזון (mâzôwn). It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Daniel. First canonically at Daniel 4:12, it enters the text early. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4203 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 2 verses 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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 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: Was meat 2×
- American Standard Version: Was food 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Providing food 1×, Was food 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4203 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4203 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4203 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4203 across 4 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.
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.
- food, feed
Word origin
Derived from מזון (mâzôwn) (H4202) — food.
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.
מָזוֹן
- food, sustenance; meal; alimentation. Erub. III, 1 הנודר מן המ׳ וכ׳ he who vows abstinence from mazon (nourishment) is permitted to partake of water and salt. Ib. 30ᵃ; Ber. 35ᵇ מים ומלח הוא דלא איקרי מ׳ וכ׳ only water and salt are not called mazon, but all other food is included in mazon; Gen. R. s. 94, beg. Erub. VIII, 2 מ׳ ב׳ סעודות food for two meals. Ber. VIII, 8 לאחר המ׳ for the after-meal (dessert). Ib. מברך על המ׳ he says the grace after meal. Ib. 5 נר ומ׳ וכ׳ the benediction for the light, then for the meal, then for the spices &c.; Pes. 103ᵃ.—ברכת המ׳, v. בְּרָכָה.—Ber. VI, 8 והוא מְזוֹנוֹ and this was his meal.—Y. Yeb. XV, 14ᵈ bot. מ׳ האשה והבנות the alimentation of wife and daughters (after a man’s death). Ib. VII, 8ᵃ bot. מ׳ הבנות מדבריהן the obligation to support the daughters from a man’s estate is a Rabbinical enactment; a. fr.—Pl. מְזוֹנוֹת. Ber. 35ᵇ בורא מיני מ׳ (abbrev. במ"מ) (Blessed be he) who created various kinds of food. Keth. IV, 6 חייב במ׳ בתו bound to support his daughter. Ib. XI, 2 אין לה מ׳ she cannot claim alimentation. Ib. 3 למ׳ מכרתי I have sold (a portion of my widowhood) for my support. Ib. XII, 2 הבעל נותן לה מ׳ … דמי מ׳ her husband supports her, and they (the heirs) must give her the equivalent of her support; a. fr.
מָזוֹן ²
- Targ. O. a. Y. I Deut. XXIV, 6. Targ. Y. I Gen. III, 18; a. fr.—Ber. 44ᵃ, v. זִיּוּנָא I.—Pl. מְזוֹנִין, מְזוֹנֵי. Y. B. Bath. IX, beg. 16ᵈ לית לה מ׳ she cannot claim alimentation. Keth. 65ᵃ פסוק לי מ׳ decree alimentation to be given me (by my husband’s heirs). Bets. 16ᵃ דהאי חק לישנא דמ׳ הוא that this ḥok (Ps. LXXXI, 5) means sustenance; a. e. e.g. Deuteronomy 24:6
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.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
