נְהִי
lamentation
also: wailing, mourning song fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5092 appears — 7 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.
Jeremiah 5 verses
- Jeremiah 9:10 וָ/נֶ֗הִי conj + n c ms For the mountains will I take up a weeping and wailing, and for the pastures of the wilderness a lamentation, because they are burned up, so that none passes through; neither can men hear the voice of the cattle; both the birds of the sky and the animals are fled, they are gone.
- Jeremiah 9:18 נֶ֑הִי n c ms and let them make haste, and take up a wailing for us, that our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush out with waters.
- Jeremiah 9:19 נְהִ֛י n c ms For a voice of wailing is heard out of Zion, How are we ruined! we are greatly confounded, because we have forsaken the land, because they have cast down our dwellings.
- Jeremiah 9:20 נֶ֔הִי n c ms Yet hear the word of Yahweh, you women, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth; and teach your daughters wailing, and everyone her neighbor lamentation.
- Jeremiah 31:15 נְהִי֙ n c ms Thus says Yahweh: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.
Amos 1 verse
Micah 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.
The Hebrew noun נהי centers on the idea of “lamentation.” The word gravitates to Jeremiah (71%), then Amos and Micah. It turns up in 7 verses across 3 books, an uncommon footprint. Its earliest occurrence is Jeremiah 9:10. BDB distinguishes 3 senses; alongside “lamentation” it spans “wailing” and “mourning song”. Dig into 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5092 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 7 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: Wailing 4×, Lamentation 3×
- American Standard Version: Wailing 4×, Lamentation 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Wailing 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Wailing 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5092 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5092 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5092 across 6 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5092 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 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.
- wailing, lamentation, mourning song
- wailing
- mourning song
Word origin
n.[m.] wailing, lamentation, mourning song;—נ׳ abs. Am 5:16 + 5 times; וָנֶ֑הִי Je 9:9;—wailing, at י׳’s judgment Mi 2:4 as acc. cogn.; Je 9:9 (c. נָשָׂא עַל־, + בְּכִי, ‖ קִינָה), v 17 (c. id., ‖ דִּמְעָה), v 18 (קוֹל נ׳), 31:15 (‖ בְּכִי, תַּמְרוּרִים); mourning song יוֹדְעֵי נ׳ Am 5:16 of professional mourners, skilled in mourning song; cf. Je 9:19, where taught (‖ קִינָה), also הִי Ez 2:10 (‖ אֵבֶל, מִסְפֵּד) q.v. (Ol Co read נהי, cf. Berthol).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from נהה (nâhâh) (H5091) — to lament.
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.
נְהֵי I
- to move; to be in commotion (cmp. Syr. אתנהי, P. Sm. 2295).
- to follow eagerly. Targ. I Sam. VII, 2. Targ. Jer. III, 17 ויִתְנְהוֹן (some ed. ויִתִּינְהוּן; h. text ונקוו). Ib. XXX, 21 (h. text ונגש). Targ. Hos. II, 18; ib. III, 3; a. e.—Targ. Is. LIII, 5 ובדנִיתְנְהִי וכ׳ ed. Lag. (ed. Wil. וכד נָצֵית) and when he pursues (is eager for) &c.
נְהִי II
- v. preced.) commotion; lamentation, elegy. Lam. R. to IV, 11, v. קִינָה. Y. Pes. VIII, 36ᵇ; Y. M. Kat. I, 80ᵈ top, v. קִינָה; a. e.
נְהֵי
- (= נהוי; v. הֲוֵי) let it be, granted, admitted. Yoma 64ᵃ נ׳ נמי ד־ even if I admit that. B. Kam. 76ᵃ נ׳ דסבר וכ׳ granted that R. S. holds &c.; a. fr.
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 7 distinct written forms H5092 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וָ/נֶ֗הִי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:10 | 1 |
| נְהִ֛י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:19 | 1 |
| נְהִ֤י | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Micah 2:4 | 1 |
| נְהִי֙ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 31:15 | 1 |
| נֶ֑הִי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:18 | 1 |
| נֶ֔הִי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:20 | 1 |
| נֶֽהִי | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Amos 5:16 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5092, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
