נִרְגָּן
to murmur
‘to murmur’ is one of 3 main senses 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H5372 appears — 4 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.
Proverbs 4 verses
- Proverbs 16:28 וְ֝/נִרְגָּ֗ן conj + Niphal ptcp.act ms A perverse man stirs up strife. A whisperer separates close friends.
- Proverbs 18:8 נִ֭רְגָּן Niphal ptcp.act ms The words of a gossip are like dainty morsels: They go down into a person's innermost parts.
- Proverbs 26:20 נִ֝רְגָּ֗ן Niphal ptcp.act ms For lack of wood a fire goes out; Without gossip, a quarrel dies down.
- Proverbs 26:22 נִ֭רְגָּן Niphal ptcp.act ms The words of a whisperer are as dainty morsels, They go down into the innermost parts.
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.
“to murmur” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb נרגן (nirgân). A scarce word — 4 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Proverbs, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. First canonically at Proverbs 16:28, it enters the text early. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Niphal. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H5372 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Proverbs 4 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 4 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 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: Talebearer 2×
- American Standard Version: Whisperer 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Murmurer 4×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5372 across 4 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 H5372 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears 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 H5372 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 5 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.
- 1. murmur (rebelliously):
Qal
- Pt. pl. רוֹגְנִים Is 29:24 murmurers; e.g. Isaiah 29:24
Niphal
- Impf. 3 mpl. וַיֵּרָֽגְנוּ ψ 106:25 and they murmured in their tents, so 2 mpl. וַיֵרָֽגְנוּ Dt 1:27. e.g. Psalms 106:25
- 2. whisper (maliciously), backbite, slander:
Niphal
- Pt. נִרְגָּן backbiter Pr 16:28; 18:8; 26:20, 22. e.g. Proverbs 16:28
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. murmur, whisper (NH id.; 𝔗 Ithpe. backbite, slander);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to roll to pieces
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.
נִרְגָּן
- , v. רָגַן
רָגַן
- (b. h.) to move in excitement; to crowd; to quarrel. Yalk. Deut. 801 רוֹגְנִין; v., however, רוֹנָן.
- to crowd together (in discontent); to be surrounded by a crowd; to create discontent. Nidd. 16ᵇ (a variant to הנרגל, v. רָגַל) (בבית המשתאות) שר הנִרְגָּן a magistrate (or scholar) that is surrounded by a crowd (whom he incites to riot) in drinking houses.
- to heap, cast, (with דברים, cmp. טוּחַ) to speak rebelliously, reproach. Gen. R. s. 20, beg. (ref. to נרגן, Prov. XVI, 28) זה הנחש … שר׳ ד׳ וכ׳ that is the serpent … that spoke rebelliously against his Creator; Yalk. Prov. 956. Num. R. s. 16 (ref. to Prov. XVIII, 8 נרגן, a. Deut. I, 27 ותרגנו) דברים שרִגְּניּ אחר וכ׳ (or שרָגְנוּ) the words which they cast up behind the Lord, caused them great distress; Tanḥ. Sh’laḥ 11; Yalk. Num. 743. e.g. Proverbs 16:28
- to gather crowds around one’s self. Sifré Deut. 24 ומִתְרַגְּנִים, v. מִתְלַהֵם.
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 3 distinct written forms H5372 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.
| Form | Parsing | Example | Uses |
|---|---|---|---|
| נִ֭רְגָּן | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 18:8 | 2 |
| וְ֝/נִרְגָּ֗ן | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 16:28 | 1 |
| נִ֝רְגָּ֗ן | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 26:20 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
