נְגִינָה
song
also: music, taunt song 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.
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
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 7 times (54%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct 5 times (38%)
- Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct 1 time (8%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 13 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5058 appears — 13 distinct verses across 5 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 1 verse
Psalms 8 verses
- Psalms 4:1 בִּ/נְגִינ֗וֹת prep + n c fp Answer me when I call, God of my righteousness. Give me relief from my distress. Have mercy on me, and hear my prayer.
- Psalms 6:1 בִּ֭/נְגִינוֹת prep + n c fp Yahweh, don't rebuke me in your anger, Neither discipline me in your wrath.
- Psalms 55:1 בִּ/נְגִינֹ֗ת prep + n c fp Listen to my prayer, God. Don't hide yourself from my supplication.
- Psalms 61:1 נְגִינַ֬ת n c fs cs Hear my cry, God. Listen to my prayer.
- Psalms 67:1 בִּ/נְגִינֹ֗ת prep + n c fp May God be merciful to us, bless us, And cause his face to shine on us. Selah.
- Psalms 69:12 וּ֝/נְגִינ֗וֹת conj + n c fp Those who sit in the gate talk about me. I am the song of the drunkards.
- Psalms 76:1 בִּ/נְגִינֹ֑ת prep + n c fp In Judah, God is known. His name is great in Israel.
- Psalms 77:6 נְגִינָתִ֗/י n c fs cs + sfx pers 1cs I remember my song in the night. I consider in my own heart; My spirit diligently inquires:
Isaiah 1 verse
Lamentations 2 verses
Habakkuk 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.
נגינה — transliterated nᵉgîynâh — is a Hebrew noun carrying the sense “song.” Its uses cluster heavily in Psalms (62% of all occurrences). Spanning 13 verses in 5 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. BDB distinguishes 3 senses; alongside “song” it spans “music” and “taunt song”. Its English rendering has broadened — “neginoth” classically, “stringed instruments” (Berean Standard Bible) in modern versions; see the renderings breakdown. 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 H5058 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 →
- 13
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 13 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 13 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 8 verses 62%
- Lamentations 2 verses 15%
- Job 1 verse 8%
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 13 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 11 verses · 85%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 15%
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: Neginoth 6×, Song 2×
- American Standard Version: Me 2×, Song 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Stringed instruments 9×, They mock me in song 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Song 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5058 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5058 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 H5058 across 14 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5058 across 11 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 3 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.
- music, song, taunt song
- music (of stringed instrument)
- song
Word origin
Derived from נגן (nâgan) (H5059) — to play stringed instrument.
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.
נְגִינָה
- 1. knocking, affliction, defeat. Ex. R. s. 18 (ref. to נְגִינָתִי, Ps. LXXVII, 7) נזכרתי אני השברים וכ׳ I remember the defeats &c.; אין נגינתי אלא לשון שבר n’ginathi means breaking; a. e. v. שָׁבַר I. e.g. Psalms 77:7
- 2. music. Ib. (ref. to נגינתי, Ps. l. c.) נזכרת אני שירים וכ׳ I remember the songs &c.—[In later Hebrew: נ׳ accent.]
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 12 distinct written forms H5058 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| בִּ/נְגִינֹ֗ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 55:1 | 2 |
| בִּ/נְגִינ֗וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 4:1 | 1 |
| בִּ/נְגִינֹ֑ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 76:1 | 1 |
| בִּ/נְגִינוֹתָֽי | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Habakkuk 3:19 | 1 |
| בִּ֭/נְגִינוֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 6:1 | 1 |
| וּ/נְגִנוֹתַ֧י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Construct | Isaiah 38:20 | 1 |
| וּ֝/נְגִינ֗וֹת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 69:12 | 1 |
| מִ/נְּגִינָתָֽ/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Lamentations 5:14 | 1 |
| נְגִינַ֬ת | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 61:1 | 1 |
| נְגִינָתִ֗/י | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Psalms 77:6 | 1 |
| נְגִינָתָ֖/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Lamentations 3:14 | 1 |
| נְגִינָתָ֣/ם | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Construct | Job 30:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5058, 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
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 12 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 13 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.
