מִשְׁעֵנָה
support
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
- 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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H4938 appears in the Book of Isaiah — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Isaiah
- Isaiah 3:1 וּ/מַשְׁעֵנָ֑ה conj + n c fs For, behold, the Lord, Yahweh of Hosts, takes away from Jerusalem and from Judah supply and support, The whole supply of bread, And the whole supply of water;
- Isaiah 36:6 מִשְׁעֶנֶת֩ n c fs cs Behold, you trust on the staff of this bruised reed, even on Egypt, whereon if a man lean, it will go into his hand, and pierce it: so is Pharaoh king of Egypt to all who trust on him.
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.
At its core, משענה (mishʻênâh) means “support.” Scripture first uses it in Exodus 21:19. It turns up in 11 verses across 8 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to 2 Kings (27%), then Isaiah and Exodus. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H4938 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 →
- 11
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 11 distinct verses.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 11 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 11 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 73%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 18%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 9%
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: Staff 10×
- American Standard Version: Staff 6×
- Berean Standard Bible: Staff 10×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Staff 6×, Staff of 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4938 across 12 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H4938 across 12 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 H4938 across 12 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4938 across 14 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 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.
- support (of every kind), staff
Word origin
Derived from משען (mishʻên) (H4937) — staff.
Forms in the corpus
The 10 distinct written forms H4938 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| הַ/מִּשְׁעֶ֨נֶת֙ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 4:31 | 2 |
| מִשְׁעֶנֶת֩ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 18:21 | 2 |
| בְּ/מִשְׁעֲנֹתָ֑/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Numbers 21:18 | 1 |
| וּ/מַשְׁעֵנָ֑ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 3:1 | 1 |
| וּ֝/מִשְׁעַנְתֶּ֗/ךָ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 23:4 | 1 |
| מִשְׁעֶ֥נֶת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 29:6 | 1 |
| מִשְׁעַנְתּ֖/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Exodus 21:19 | 1 |
| מִשְׁעַנְתּ֛/וֹ | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Zechariah 8:4 | 1 |
| מִשְׁעַנְתִּ֖/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 4:29 | 1 |
| מִשְׁעַנְתִּ֣/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | 2 Kings 4:29 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 11 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 11 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
- Exodus 21:19
- Numbers 21:18
- Judges 6:21
- 2 Kings 4:29
- Psalms 23:4
- Isaiah 3:1
- Ezekiel 29:6
- Zechariah 8:4
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.
