מַתַּת
gift
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 5 times (83%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (17%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H4991 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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 Kings 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Ecclesiastes 2 verses
- Ecclesiastes 3:13 מַתַּ֥ת n c fs cs Also that every man should eat and drink, and enjoy good in all his labor, is the gift of God.
- Ecclesiastes 5:19 מַתַּ֥ת n c fs cs Every man also to whom God has given riches and wealth, and has given him power to eat of it, and to take his portion, and to rejoice in his labor--this is the gift of God.
Ezekiel 2 verses
- Ezekiel 46:5 מַתַּ֣ת n c fs cs and the meal-offering shall be an ephah for the ram, and the meal-offering for the lambs as he is able to give, and a hin of oil to an ephah.
- Ezekiel 46:11 מַתַּ֣ת n c fs cs In the feasts and in the solemnities the meal-offering shall be an ephah for a bull, and an ephah for a ram, and for the lambs as he is able to give, and a hin of oil to an ephah.
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, מתת (mattâth) means “gift.” Scripture first uses it in 1 Kings 13:7. With 6 verses in 4 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in Ecclesiastes (33% of all occurrences). Sharing its root, it stands alongside מתן, מתנה and מתן. 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 H4991 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Ecclesiastes 2 verses 33%
- Ezekiel 2 verses 33%
- 1 Kings 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 3 verses · 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).
- King James Version: Give 2×, Is the gift 2×
- American Standard Version: Give 2×, Is the gift 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Gift 1×, Gifts 1×, Give 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Gift of 2×, Give 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H4991 across 6 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 H4991 across 6 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H4991 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H4991 across 6 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 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.
- gift, reward
Word origin
n.f. gift;—abs. מַתָּ֑ת 1 K 13:7; cstr. מַתַּת Pr 25:14 + 4 times;—gift = reward 1 K 13:7; מַתַּת יָדוֹ the gift of his hand, i.e. of his power, what he is able to give Ez 46:5, 11 (cf. מַתָּנָה and יָד 2); מ׳ אֱלֹהִים Ec 3:13 the gift of God (of the enjoyment of man), so 5:18; מ׳ שָׁ֑קֶר Pr 25:14 a gift of falsity, i.e. one promised and not given.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from מתן (mattân) (H4976) — gifts.
Forms in the corpus
The 4 distinct written forms H4991 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מַתַּ֣ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ezekiel 46:5 | 2 |
| מַתַּ֥ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Ecclesiastes 3:13 | 2 |
| בְּ/מַתַּת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Proverbs 25:14 | 1 |
| מַתָּֽת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 13:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H4991, 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.
- מתן Mattân H4977 Mattan
- מתני Mattᵉnay H4982 Mattenai
- מתניה Mattanyâh H4983 Mattaniah
- מתתיה Mattithyâh H4993 Mattithiah
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 7 — not the complete family. 4 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
