נָגַן
to play stringed instrument
‘to play stringed instrument’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Piel verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Infinitive Construct
- A bound verbal noun, frequently with prepositions (“to write / in writing”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Piel, Infinitive Construct 6 times (40%)
- Verb, Piel, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 5 times (33%)
- Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Piel, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 1st Person, Common, Plural 1 time (7%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (7%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 15 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5059 appears — 12 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.
1 Samuel 6 verses
- 1 Samuel 16:16 מְנַגֵּ֣ן וְ/נִגֵּ֥ן Piel ptcp.act ms conj + Piel wpf 3ms Let our lord now command your servants who are before you, to seek out a man who is a skillful player on the harp: and it shall happen, when the evil spirit from God is on you, that he shall play with his hand, and you shall be well.
- 1 Samuel 16:17 לְ/נַגֵּ֔ן prep + Piel inf.cs Saul said to his servants, Provide me now a man who can play well, and bring him to me.
- 1 Samuel 16:18 נַ֠גֵּן Piel inf.cs Then answered one of the young men, and said, Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skillful in playing, and a mighty man of valor, and a man of war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person; and Yahweh is with him.
- 1 Samuel 16:23 וְ/נִגֵּ֣ן conj + Piel pf 3ms It happened, when the [evil] spirit from God was on Saul, that David took the harp, and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.
- 1 Samuel 18:10 מְנַגֵּ֥ן Piel ptcp.act ms It happened on the next day, that an evil spirit from God came mightily on Saul, and he prophesied in the midst of the house: and David played with his hand, as he did day by day. Saul had his spear in his hand;
- 1 Samuel 19:9 מְנַגֵּ֥ן Piel ptcp.act ms An evil spirit from Yahweh was on Saul, as he sat in his house with his spear in his hand; and David was playing with his hand.
2 Kings 1 verse
Psalms 2 verses
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 23:16 נַגֵּן֙ Piel inf.cs Take a harp, go about the city, you prostitute that has been forgotten; make sweet melody, sing many songs, that you may be remembered.
- Isaiah 38:20 נְנַגֵּ֛ן Piel impf 1cp Yahweh is [ready] to save me: Therefore we will sing my songs with stringed instruments All the days of our life in the house of Yahweh.
Ezekiel 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.
נגן — transliterated nâgan — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to play stringed instrument.” Its uses cluster heavily in 1 Samuel (50% of all occurrences). With 12 verses in 5 books, it is an uncommon word in the Hebrew Bible. It first appears in 1 Samuel 16:16. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Piel. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5059 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,836
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,836 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 12 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 12 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 10 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 17%
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: Played 4×
- American Standard Version: Played 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Play 3×, Harpist 2×, Played 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Playing 3×, Harpist 2×, Play 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5059 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 11 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 H5059 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 13 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 H5059 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 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 H5059 across 17 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 8 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
What do BDB’s symbols mean?
BDB uses these scholarly abbreviations:
| Symbol | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 𝔊 | the Septuagint (the ancient Greek translation, LXX) |
| 𝔙 | the Vulgate (the Latin translation) |
| 𝔖 | the Syriac version (the Peshitta) |
| 𝔗 | the Targum (the Aramaic translation) |
| ψ | the Psalms |
| √ | root (the underlying root or stem) |
| ‖ | parallel passage (a synonymous or contrasted parallel) |
| † | the dagger: every passage where the word occurs is cited |
The 2 senses and sub-senses the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon distinguishes for this word, in lexicon order (not ranked by frequency), with BDB’s own verbatim wording and sub-sense lettering. Shown in Hebrew script with BDB’s own scholarly abbreviations. The condensed entry is in the Lexicon Entry tab. See also the Forms in the corpus table below.
Qal
- Pt. נֹגְנִים ψ 68:26 players (‖ שָׁרִים, עֲלָמוֹת תּוֹפֵפוֹת). e.g. Psalms 68:26
Piel
- Pf. וְנִגֵּן 1 S 16:16 (consec.), v 23; Impf. 1 pl. נְנַגֵּן Is 38:20; Inf. cstr. נַגֵּן 1 S 16:17 + 5 times; Pt. מְנַגֵּן 1 S 16:16 + 4 times;—play בַּכִּנּוֹר 1 S 16:16; בְּיָדוֹ v 16, 23 (כִּנּוֹר in context), 18:10; 19:9; c. acc. cogn. Is 38:20; in sim. מֵטִב נַגֵּן Ez 33:32 (‖ שִׁיר עֲגָבִים יְפֵה־קוֹל); אִישׁ מֵיטִיב לְנ׳ 1 S 16:17, cf. ψ 33:3 Is 23:16 (both ‖ שִׁיר), יָדַע נ׳ 1 S 16:18; also 2 K 3:15; Pt. = player, minstrel (cf. Qal) 2 K 3:15(×2); cf. also אִישׁ יֹדֵעַ מְנַגֵּן בַּכִּנּוֹר 1 S 16:16 (Ges§ 120 b). e.g. 1 Samuel 16:16
Senses from the full Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon (Brown, Driver, Briggs; Oxford 1906 — public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). Full attribution on Sources.
Word origin
vb. touch (strings), play a stringed instrument (NH Pi.; Aramaic נְגַן Pa.);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: a primitive root
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.
נָגַן
- to strike, knock, v. נְגִינָה.
- (cmp. Lat. pulso) to play on a musical instrument, in gen. to make music. Ber. 63ᵇ חנניה יְנַגֵּן בכנור let Hananiah play on the harp (act as a Levite). Midr. Till. to Ps. CXIII; Yalk. Ps. 872 והייתי מְנַגֶּנֶת לך and I (Israel) was singing unto thee; a. fr.
נְגַן
- same. Targ. II Kings III, 15.
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 14 distinct written forms H5059 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’s occurrences in the concordance. Hebrew forms include their vowel points and cantillation, so a single lemma takes many written forms.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5059, 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.
Derived from this word
- אגן ʼaggân H101 bowl
- גת gath H1660 winepress
- מנגינה mangîynâh H4485 mocking song
- נגינה nᵉgîynâh H5058 song
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 12 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.
