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אׇמְנָם

verily

H551 Strong's Hebrew
ʼomnâm Transliteration
/om-nawm'/ Pronunciation
Usage in the Hebrew Bible 9 appearances

Compare with another word →

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.

“verily” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb אמנם (ʼomnâm). More than two-thirds of its appearances fall in Job. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 9 verses — uncommon. First canonically at Ruth 3:12, it enters the text early. It shares a root with אמן, אמנה and אמנה. See the sense tree, 9-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.

Gloss history

Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship

Strong's · 1890
indeed
Modern gloss
verily
Strong's 1890 sometimes compressed multiple senses — or homonymous roots — under one number, and used 19th-century English phrasing that no longer carries the same connotation. The modern gloss reflects current BDB scholarship; open the Lexicon Entry tab for the full sense breakdown. Download share card

About this word

Strong's H551 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 →

9
distinct verses
The word appears in 9 distinct verses.
4 / 39
OT books
The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
Ruth 3:12
first appearance
The earliest occurrence is in Ruth 3:12.
Isaiah 37:18
last appearance
The latest occurrence is in Isaiah 37:18.
#2,481
by frequency
Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,481 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).

View all 9 occurrences in the concordance →


Most concentrated in

By section of the Old Testament

  • Pentateuch 0 · 0%
  • Historical 2 · 22%
  • Wisdom 6 · 67%
  • Prophets 1 · 11%

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 9 distinct verses.

  • Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 78%
  • Prophets (Nevi'im) 2 verses · 22%

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: Truth 2×
  • American Standard Version: Truth 3×
  • Berean Standard Bible: Truly 4×, Is true 2×
  • unfoldingWord Literal Text: Truly 7×

King James Version Public Domain

Renders H551 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Truth” 2×

Plus 7 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 H551 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Truth” 3×

Plus 6 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 H551 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Truly” 4×
  • “Is true” 2×

Plus 2 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 H551 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:

  • “Truly” 7×

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 1 sense 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.

  1. verily, truly, surely

Word origin

adv. (= אֻמְנָם) verily, truly, in asseverations 2 K 19:17 (= Is 37:18) Jb 19:4, 5; 34:12; 36:4 Ru 3:12, also ironical Jb 9:2; 12:2.

— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.

Derived from אמן (ʼômen) (H544) — faithfulness.

Part of speech: Adverb TWOT: 116j


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.

אמנם

  • , v. אֲמָנָה II

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 5 distinct written forms H551 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
אָ֭מְנָם Adverb Job 9:2 4
אָמְנָ֖ם Adverb 2 Kings 19:17 2
אָמְנָ֔ם Adverb Ruth 3:12 1
אָמְנָ֗ם Adverb Job 34:12 1
אָמְנָ֥ם Adverb Job 19:4 1

Same root — word family

Other BDB entries built from the same root as H551, 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

Derived from this word

Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 6 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.


Septuagint verse parallels

This word appears in 9 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 9 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.

Reading settings

Reading text

Shown beneath each verse's original-language words.

Old Testament
Old Testament edition

Read the OT as the Masoretic Hebrew (MT) or the Greek Septuagint (LXX).

English shown for the Greek Septuagint (in the Hebrew ↔ Greek comparison).

Comparing translations? Open the Compare panel on any verse page to stack up to four side by side.