מַעֲנָה
ploughing ground
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.
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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
1 distinct verse where H4618 appears in the Absolute state, across 1 book. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
1 Samuel 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 maʻănâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “ploughing ground.” It is rare — just 2 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. Its uses cluster heavily in 1 Samuel (50% of all occurrences). It first appears in 1 Samuel 14:14. From the same root come ענה, ענה and ענו. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4618 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Acre 1×, Furrows 1×
- American Standard Version†: 's length in an acre 1×, Furrows 1×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Acre 1×, They made their furrows 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Furrow 1×, Furrows 1×, Of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4618 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4618 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4618 across 2† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4618 across 4† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- ploughing ground, place for task
Word origin
n.f. place for task (?), specif. field for ploughing;—pl. sf. לְמַעֲנוֹתָם ψ 129:3 Kt they have extended their ploughing-grounds (Qr מַעֲנִיתָם); sg. מַעֲנָה only 1 S 14:14, where text corrupt and meaning dub. v. Comm.
— 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) (H6031) — to afflict.
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 3 distinct written forms H4618 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ל/מענות/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Psalms 129:3 | 1 |
| לְ/מַעֲנִיתָֽ/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 129:3 | 1 |
| מַעֲנָ֖ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 14:14 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4618, 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
- ענה ʻănâh H6033 poor
- ענו ʻânâv H6035 poor
- ענות ʻĕnûwth H6039 affliction
- עני ʻŏnîy H6040 affliction
- עני ʻânîy H6041 poor
- ענין ʻinyân H6045 occupation
- תענית taʻănîyth H8589 fasting
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 11 — not the complete family. 2 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 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.
