נֶפְתּוֹחַ
Nephtoah
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Nephtoah’ 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
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
Every verse where H5318 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Joshua 2 verses
- Joshua 15:9 נֶפְתּ֔וֹחַ n Proper and the border extended from the top of the mountain to the spring of the waters of Nephtoah, and went out to the cities of Mount Ephron; and the border extended to Baalah (the same is Kiriath Jearim);
- Joshua 18:15 נֶפְתּֽוֹחַ n Proper The south quarter was from the uttermost part of Kiriath Jearim; and the border went out westward, and went out to the spring of the waters of Nephtoah;
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.
נפתוח — transliterated Nephtôwach — is a Hebrew name carrying the sense “Nephtoah.” A scarce word — 2 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than three-quarters of its appearances fall in Joshua. Debuting at Joshua 15:9, it then recurs through the corpus. 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 H5318 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Joshua 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 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: Nephtoah 2×
- American Standard Version: Nephtoah 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Nephtoah 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Nephtoah 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5318 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5318 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5318 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5318 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 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.
- Nephtoah = "opening"
- a spring or source of water on the boundary of the territories of Judah and Benjamin; located northwest of Jerusalem
Word origin
n.pr.loc. Μαφθω, Ναφθω, in מֵי נ׳ Jos 15:9; 18:15 (P), on border of Judah and Benj.; usually identif. with spring Liftâ, near Jerus. to the NW., v. BuhlGeogr. 101. נַפְתֻּחִים v. p. 661.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פתח (pâthach) (H6605) — to open.
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H5318 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נֶפְתּ֔וֹחַ | Noun, Proper | Joshua 15:9 | 1 |
| נֶפְתּֽוֹחַ | Noun, Proper | Joshua 18:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H5318, 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
- מפתח maphtêach H4668 key
- מפתח miphtâch H4669 opening
- פתוח pittûwach H6603 engraving
- פתח pᵉthach H6606 to open
- פתח pethach H6607 doorway
- פתח pêthach H6608 opening
- פתחה pᵉthichâh H6609 sword
- פתחון pithchôwn H6610 opening
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 13 — not the complete family. 3 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Nephtoah). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
Opened, a fountain and a stream issuing from it on the border between Judah and Benjamin (Josh. 15:8, 9; 18:15). It has been identified with Ain Lifta, a spring about 2 1/2 miles north-west of Jerusalem. Others, however, have identified it with Ain' Atan, on the south-west of Bethlehem, whence water is conveyed through "Pilate's aqueduct" to the Haram area at Jerusalem.
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
