סָכַן
to be useful
‘to be useful’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”). Here: ‘be of use or service’
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”).
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Infinitive Absolute
- An unbound verbal noun, often intensifying or standing in for a finite verb.
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“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”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 5 times (42%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (17%)
- Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (8%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Absolute 1 time (8%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (8%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (8%)
- Verb, Hiphil, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (8%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 12 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H5532 appears — 10 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.
Numbers 1 verse
1 Kings 2 verses
- 1 Kings 1:2 סֹכֶ֑נֶת Qal ptcp.act fs Therefore his servants said to him, Let there be sought for my lord the king a young virgin: and let her stand before the king, and cherish him; and let her lie in your bosom, that my lord the king may keep warm.
- 1 Kings 1:4 סֹכֶ֨נֶת֙ Qal ptcp.act fs The young lady was very beautiful; and she cherished the king, and ministered to him; but the king didn't know her intimately.
Job 5 verses
- Job 15:3 יִסְכּ֑וֹן Qal impf 3ms Should he reason with unprofitable talk, Or with speeches with which he can do no good?
- Job 22:2 יִסְכָּן יִסְכֹּ֖ן Qal impf 3ms Qal impf 3ms "Can a man be profitable to God? Surely he who is wise is profitable to himself.
- Job 22:21 הַסְכֶּן Hiphil impv 2ms "Acquaint yourself with him, now, and be at peace. Thereby good shall come to you.
- Job 34:9 יִסְכָּן Qal impf 3ms For he has said, 'It profits a man nothing That he should delight himself with God.'
- Job 35:3 יִּסְכָּן Qal impf 3ms That you ask, 'What advantage will it be to you? What profit shall I have, more than if I had sinned?'
Psalms 1 verse
Isaiah 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.
At its core, סכן (çâkan) means “to be useful.” The word gravitates to Job (50%), then 1 Kings and Numbers. It appears 10 verses across 5 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. First canonically at Numbers 22:30, it enters the text early. Across 2 stems, its meaning turns on the binyan (Qal, Hiphil). 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 H5532 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 →
- 10
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 10 distinct verses.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,101
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,101 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 10 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 10 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 60%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 30%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 10%
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: Acquaint 1×, Advantage 1×, Art acquainted 1×
- American Standard Version: Acquaint 1×, Advantage 1×, Art acquainted 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Be of use 1×, Before 1×, Benefit 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Benefit 2×, Does 2×, Have i ever been accustomed 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H5532 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H5532 across 12 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H5532 across 10 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Not rendered by a distinct English word in 2 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H5532 across 15 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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 3 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
- 1. be of use or service
- 2. benefit, profit
Hiphil
- . be used, wont, strictly exhibit use, or habit
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
[ סָכַן ] vb. be of use or service, benefit
— 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.
סָכַן I
- Saf. of כון, כנן; cmp. Targ. Y. Num. XXII, 30) to arrange, manage.—Denom. (b. h.) סֹכֵן; מִסְכֵּן q. v.
- to supply (rations to the poor); to give niggardly.—Part. pass. מְסוּכָּן. Midr. Prov. ch. XXII, v. מִסְכֵֹּן I.
סְכַן
- ; Af. אַסְכֵּן to arrange. Targ. Ps. CXXXIX, 3 (h. text הסכנת).
- to be trained, prepared. Targ. Job XXXIV, 9 (h. text יסכן).
סָכַן II
- , Pi. סִכֵּן to be perplexed; to despair; to be in danger. Ber. I, 3 וסִכַּנְתִּי בעצמי וכ׳ and I despaired of my life on account of robbers (whom I met there); Y. ib. 3ᵇ bot. וסִיכַּ׳. Men. 64ᵇ בזוב סִיכְּנָה, v. זוֹב; בעינה ס׳ she was in danger of losing her eye-sight; בים ס׳ she was in danger of drowning in the sea.—Part. pass. מְסוּכָּן; f. מְסוּכֶּנֶת q. v.
- 1. to become confused, to be misled;
- 2. to be exposed to danger. Tosef. Meg. I, 3; Meg. 2ᵃ Var. הואיל ומִסְתַּכְּנִין בה, v. סָכַל II; Y. ib. I, 70ᵈ במקום שנכנסין וכ׳ (read: שמסתכנין, or שנִסְכָּנִין, Nif.) where people might be misled, they must read the M’gillah on the fourteenth; ר׳ יוסי בעי אם במקום שנכנסין אל יקראו וכ׳ (correct as above) R. José (taking מסתכנין in the sense of being in danger) objected, if danger to life is connected with reading the M’gillah, let them not read it at all.
סְכֵן
- Y. Shebi. IV, 35ᵇ top וסכין and got himself into trouble. Y. Ab. Zar. II, 40ᵈ bot. רחם … וס׳ fell in love with a woman …, and became dangerously ill.; Y. Sabb. XIV, 14ᵈ bot. Y. Ab. Zar. l. c. ומשתי ולא יִסְכַּן and let him drink it, that he may not get ill. Y. Shek. V, 48ᵈ בעינה סַכְנַת she was in danger of losing her eye-sight; בימה ס׳ she was in danger of drowning &c., v. preced. Y. Ab. Zar. III, 42ᶜ וסַכְנָן נפשתא (not וסכנתן) human lives were in danger; a. fr.
- to expose to danger; to hurt; to mislead, bring into trouble. Ber. 25ᵇ סַכַּנְתּוּן לברי you might have brought my son into trouble (by causing him to sin unawares). Sabb. 116ᵃ בעו לסַכּוּנֵיה they tried to give him trouble; a. fr.—Part. pass. מְסַכַּן; f. מְסַכְּנָא. Targ. II Sam. XXII, 5.—Y. Peah VIII, 21ᵃ top עד דהוא מצמית לון הוא מס׳ until he gets them together for a meeting, he might be in danger (of starving).
- to be exposed to danger, be hurt; to be in trouble. Targ. Y. Deut. XXV, 3. Targ. Ps. CXIX, 109.—Pes. 112ᵇ וא׳ ליה and he might be injured; ib. ומִסְתַּכֵּן. Keth. 61ᵃ אי לאו … אִסְתַּכְּנִי if he had not given it to me, I should have become seriously ill; a. e.
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 11 distinct written forms H5532 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִסְכָּן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 22:2 | 2 |
| הִסְכַּ֔נְתִּי | Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Numbers 22:30 | 1 |
| הִסְכַּֽנְתָּה | Verb, Hiphil, Perfect, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Psalms 139:3 | 1 |
| הַ/סֹּכֵ֣ן | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 22:15 | 1 |
| הַֽ/הַסְכֵּ֣ן | Verb, Hiphil, Infinitive Absolute | Numbers 22:30 | 1 |
| הַסְכֶּן | Verb, Hiphil, Imperative, 2nd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 22:21 | 1 |
| יִסְכּ֑וֹן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 15:3 | 1 |
| יִסְכֹּ֖ן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 22:2 | 1 |
| יִּסְכָּן | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Job 35:3 | 1 |
| סֹכֶ֑נֶת | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 1:2 | 1 |
| סֹכֶ֨נֶת֙ | Verb, Qal, Participle Active, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | 1 Kings 1:4 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 10 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 10 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.
