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מַטְעָם

dainties

H4303 Strong's Hebrew
maṭʻam Transliteration
/mat-am'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 8 appearances

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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.

מטעם (maṭʻam) is a Hebrew noun most often rendered “dainties.” It clusters heavily in Genesis, which alone accounts for 75% of its uses. With 8 verses in 2 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in Genesis 27:4. Translators differ — “savoury meat” in the King James Version, then “tasty food” (unfoldingWord Literal Text), as the renderings breakdown shows. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
dainty
Modern gloss
dainties
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H4303 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.
2 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
Genesis 27:4
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Genesis 27:4.
Proverbs 23:6
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Proverbs 23:6.
#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

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 6 · 75%
  • Historical 0 · 0%
  • Wisdom 2 · 25%
  • Prophets 0 · 0%

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.

  • Torah (Pentateuch) 6 verses · 75%
  • Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 25%

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: Savoury meat 6×
  • American Standard Version: Savory food 6×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Tasty dish 3×, Delicacies 2×, Tasty food 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tasty food 6×, Delicious morsels 2×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H4303 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Savoury meat” 6×

Plus 2 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 H4303 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Savory food” 6×

Plus 2 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 H4303 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Tasty dish” 3×
  • “Delicacies” 2×
  • “Tasty food” 2×

Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H4303 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Tasty food” 6×
  • “Delicious morsels” 2×

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.

  1. tasty or savory food, delectable food, dainties

Word origin

[ מַטְעָם ] n.m. only pl. tasty or savoury food, dainties

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from טעם (ṭâʻam) (H2938) — to taste.

Part of speech: Noun Masculine TWOT: 815b


Forms in the corpus

The 7 distinct written forms H4303 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.

Form Parsing Example Uses
מַטְעַמִּ֔ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Genesis 27:14 2
הַ/מַּטְעַמִּ֛ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Genesis 27:17 1
לְ/מַטְעַמֹּתָֽי/ו Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct Proverbs 23:6 1
לְ/מַטְעַמּוֹתָ֑י/ו Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Construct Proverbs 23:3 1
מַטְעַמִּ֖ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Genesis 27:7 1
מַטְעַמִּ֛ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Genesis 27:9 1
מַטְעַמִּ֜ים Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute Genesis 27:4 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4303, 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 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.