מִפְתָּן
threshold
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Construct-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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct 6 times (75%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (25%)
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 H4670 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.
1 Samuel 2 verses
- 1 Samuel 5:4 הַ/מִּפְתָּ֔ן ptcl def.art + n c ms When they arose early on the next day morning, behold, Dagon was fallen on his face to the ground before the ark of Yahweh; and the head of Dagon and both the palms of his hands [lay] cut off on the threshold; only [the stump of] Dagon was left to him.
- 1 Samuel 5:5 מִפְתַּ֥ן n c ms cs Therefore neither the priests of Dagon, nor any who come into Dagon's house, tread on the threshold of Dagon in Ashdod, to this day.
Ezekiel 5 verses
- Ezekiel 9:3 מִפְתַּ֣ן n c ms cs The glory of the God of Israel was gone up from the cherub, whereupon it was, to the threshold of the house: and he called to the man clothed in linen, who had the writer's inkhorn by his side.
- Ezekiel 10:4 מִפְתַּ֣ן n c ms cs The glory of Yahweh mounted up from the cherub, [and stood] over the threshold of the house; and the house was filled with the cloud, and the court was full of the brightness of Yahweh's glory.
- Ezekiel 10:18 מִפְתַּ֣ן n c ms cs The glory of Yahweh went forth from over the threshold of the house, and stood over the cherubim.
- Ezekiel 46:2 מִפְתַּ֥ן n c ms cs The prince shall enter by the way of the porch of the gate outside, and shall stand by the post of the gate; and the priests shall prepare his burnt-offering and his peace-offerings, and he shall worship at the threshold of the gate: then he shall go forth; but the gate shall not be shut until the evening.
- Ezekiel 47:1 מִפְתַּ֤ן n c ms cs He brought me back to the door of the house; and, behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward; (for the forefront of the house was toward the east;) and the waters came down from under, from the right side of the house, on the south of the altar.
Zephaniah 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.
“threshold” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun מפתן (miphtân). It clusters heavily in Ezekiel, which alone accounts for 63% of its uses. It turns up in 8 verses across 3 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is 1 Samuel 5:4. 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 H4670 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 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: Threshold 4×
- American Standard Version: Threshold 3×, Over the threshold 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Threshold 8×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Threshold 5×, Threshold of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4670 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 H4670 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H4670 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4670 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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.
- threshold
Word origin
n.[m.] threshold (cf. NH פָּתִין cross-beam;? Arabic فَيْتَنٌ carpenter);—abs. מ׳ 1 S 5:4; Zp 1:9; cstr. מִפְתַּן דָּגוֹן 1 S 5:5, מ׳ הַבַּיִת Ez 9:3; 10:4, 18; 47:1, מ׳ הַשַּׁעַר 46:2.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פתן (pethen) (H6620) — serpent.
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.
מִפְתָּן
- (b. h.) threshold. Ab. Zar. 41ᵇ; Y. ib. III, 42ᵈ top נהגו במ׳ יותר וכ׳ (sub. קדושה) they revered the threshold more than the Dagon; a. e.—Pl. מִפְתָּנוֹת. Ib. ישראל עשו כמה מ׳ the Israelites worshipped many thresholds.
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 5 distinct written forms H4670 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מִפְתַּ֣ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 9:3 | 3 |
| מִפְתַּ֥ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 46:2 | 2 |
| הַ/מִּפְתָּ֔ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Samuel 5:4 | 1 |
| הַ/מִּפְתָּ֖ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Zephaniah 1:9 | 1 |
| מִפְתַּ֤ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 47:1 | 1 |
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.
