מְטָא
to reach
also: come upon, attain 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 3 times (38%)
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural 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 H4291 appears — 8 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 8 verses
- Daniel 4:11 יִמְטֵ֣א Qal impf 3ms The tree grew, and was strong, and the height of it reached to the sky, and the sight of it to the end of all the earth.
- Daniel 4:20 יִמְטֵ֣א Qal impf 3ms The tree that you saw, which grew, and was strong, whose height reached to the sky, and the sight of it to all the earth;
- Daniel 4:22 וּ/מְטָ֣ת conj + Qal pf 3fs it is you, O king, that are grown and become strong; for your greatness is grown, and reaches to the sky, and your dominion to the end of the earth.
- Daniel 4:24 מְטָ֖ת Qal pf 3fs this is the interpretation, O king, and it is the decree of the Most High, which is come on my lord the king:
- Daniel 4:28 מְּטָ֔א Qal pf 3ms All this came on the king Nebuchadnezzar.
- Daniel 6:24 מְט֞וֹ Qal pf 3mp The king commanded, and they brought those men who had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and broke all their bones in pieces, before they came to the bottom of the den.
- Daniel 7:13 מְטָ֔ה Qal pf 3ms I saw in the night-visions, and, behold, there came with the clouds of the sky one like a son of man, and he came even to the ancient of days, and they brought him near before him.
- Daniel 7:22 מְטָ֔ה Qal pf 3ms until the ancient of days came, and judgment was given to the saints of the Most High, and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom.
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.
מטא (mᵉṭâʼ) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to reach.” It clusters heavily in Daniel, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. With 8 verses in 1 book, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Daniel 4:11. Ranging over 4 senses, its meaning includes “come upon” and “attain”. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4291 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 →
- 8
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 8 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 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 8 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Daniel 8 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 8 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 8 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: Came 3×
- American Standard Version: Came 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Reached 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Reached 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4291 across 8 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 H4291 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4291 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 H4291 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.
Senses in BDB
The 4 senses 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.
- to reach, come upon, attain
(Peal)
- to reach, come to
- to reach, extend
- to come upon
Word origin
מְטָא, מְטָה vb. reach, attain
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מצא (mâtsâʼ) (H4672) — to find.
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.
מְטָא
- , v. מְטֵי
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 H4291 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִמְטֵ֣א | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Daniel 4:11 | 2 |
| מְטָ֔ה | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Daniel 7:13 | 2 |
| וּ/מְטָ֣ת | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Daniel 4:22 | 1 |
| מְט֞וֹ | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Daniel 6:24 | 1 |
| מְטָ֖ת | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Daniel 4:24 | 1 |
| מְּטָ֔א | Verb, Qal, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Daniel 4:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4291, 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
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 8 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 8 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.
