מַעֲנֶה
answer
‘answer’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- 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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 4 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (38%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 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 H4617 appears — 8 distinct verses across 3 books. 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.
Job 2 verses
Proverbs 5 verses
- Proverbs 15:1 מַֽעֲנֶה n c ms A gentle answer turns away wrath, But a harsh word stirs up anger.
- Proverbs 15:23 בְּ/מַעֲנֵה prep + n c ms cs Joy comes to a man with the reply of his mouth. How good is a word at the right time!
- Proverbs 16:1 מַעֲנֵ֥ה n c ms cs The plans of the heart belong to man, But the answer of the tongue is from Yahweh.
- Proverbs 16:4 לַֽ/מַּעֲנֵ֑/הוּ prep det + n c ms cs + sfx pers 3ms Yahweh has made everything for its own end-- Yes, even the wicked for the day of evil.
- Proverbs 29:19 מַעֲנֶֽה Hiphil ptcp.act ms A servant can't be corrected by words. Though he understands, yet he will not respond.
Micah 1 verse
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.
מענה — transliterated maʻăneh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “answer.” More than half of its appearances fall in Proverbs. It appears 8 verses across 3 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. Debuting at Job 32:3, it then recurs through the corpus. Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. See the sense tree, 8-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4617 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.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 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 →
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) 7 verses · 88%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 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: Answer 4×
- American Standard Version: Answer 4×
- Berean Standard Bible: Answer 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Answer 4×, Answer of 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4617 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4617 across 8 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4617 across 7 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4617 across 9 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 2 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.
- answer, response
- (TWOT) place for task
Word origin
n.m. Pr 15:1 answer, response;—abs. מ׳־רַךְ Pr 15:1 a gentle answer; cstr. מַעֲנֵה פִּיו v 23, cf. מ׳ לָשׁוֹן 16:1 (i.e. ability to answer); מ׳ אֱלֹהִים Mi 3:7 i.e. response for guidance; abs. also Pr 29:19 response = obedience; Jb 32:3, 5 reply, refutation; sf. לַמַּעֲנֵהוּ Pr 16:4 = for its purpose, that for which it answers (v. Toy).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ענה (ʻânâh) (H6030) — to answer.
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.
מַעֲנֶה
- answer. Midr. Till. to Ps. VIII לא מצאו לו מ׳ they knew not what to answer him.
מַעֲנָה
- preced.)
- 1. turn of the plough, furrow, furrow’s length. Tosef. Ḥull. IV (V), 6. Ohol. XVII, 2; a. e.
- 2. (perh. מַעֲנֶה m.) handle of the plough; coulter. Tosef. Shebi. III, 20 ובלבד שלא יסמוך לה מ׳; Y. ib. IV, 35ᵇ bot. ובלבד שלא יסמוך את המ׳ provided that (in training the cow for ploughing) he will not press the coulter (so as to make the appearance of real ploughing).
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 8 distinct written forms H4617 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בְּ/מַעֲנֵה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 15:23 | 1 |
| לַֽ/מַּעֲנֵ֑/הוּ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 16:4 | 1 |
| מַֽעֲנֶה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 15:1 | 1 |
| מַעֲנֵ֖ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Micah 3:7 | 1 |
| מַעֲנֵ֥ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 16:1 | 1 |
| מַעֲנֶ֑ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 32:3 | 1 |
| מַעֲנֶ֗ה | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Job 32:5 | 1 |
| מַעֲנֶֽה | Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 29:19 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4617, 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
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. 3 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). 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.
