אָֽנָּ֫א
I beseech you
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
- Particle
- A short function word — article, negation, interrogative, the sign of the direct object, and the like.
Every verse where H577 appears in the Book of 2 Kings — 1 distinct verse. 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.
2 Kings
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.
“I beseech you” is the headline sense of the Hebrew name אנא (ʼânnâʼ). Its earliest occurrence is Genesis 50:17. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 12 verses — uncommon. More than a quarter of its appearances fall in Psalms. See 12-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H577 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 →
- 12
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 12 distinct verses.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,001
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,001 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 12 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 12 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 50%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 33%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 17%
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: I beseech 6×
- American Standard Version: I beseech 3×, Jehovah i beseech 2×, Oh 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: O 3×, Please 3×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Ah 4×, Oh 3×, Please 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H577 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 H577 across 13 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 H577 across 10 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 3 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H577 across 14 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.
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.
- ah now! I/we beseech you, oh now!, pray now! (participle of entreaty usually followed by the imperative verb)
Word origin
interj. (from אָהּ and נָא, q.v.) a strong part. of entreaty, ah, now! I (or we) beseech thee! often sq. an imper.; Gn 50:17 (to Joseph) אָנָּא שָׂא נָא וג׳ Ah, now! forgive, we pray, etc., Ex 32:31 (to God); elsewhere always sq. י׳ or אֲדֹנָי ψ 118:25(×2) Ne 1:5, 11 Dn 9:4. Written אָֽנָּ֫ה 2 K 20:3 (= Is 38:3) Jon 1:14; 4:2 ψ 116:4, 16.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אהבה (ʼahăbâh) (H160) — love.
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.
אָנָּא
- (b. h.) oh! I pray. Succ. III, 9. Yoma VI, 2.
אֲנָא
- , emph. אֲנָנָא ch. = h. אֲנִי, I. הא אנא contr. הָאנָא. Targ. O. Gen. XXII, 7; a. fr.—Ḥull. 2ᵇ א׳ וכ׳ as to myself &c. Y. Taan. IV, 68ᵈ bot. דאננא משלים וכ׳ that I myself should surrender the country.—Pl. אֲנַן we. Targ. Y. Gen. XLIII, 8; a. e.—Ber. 49ᵇ נחזי א׳ let us see; a. fr.—אֲנַחְנָא, נַחְנָא. Targ. O. Gen. l. c.; a. fr.—
אִנָּא
- 1. v. אִינָא.—
- *2. = אִן אֲנָא if I.
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 10 distinct written forms H577 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אָנָּ֤ה | Particle, Interjection | Isaiah 38:3 | 3 |
| אָנָּ֣א | Particle, Exhortation | Nehemiah 1:11 | 2 |
| אָ֣נָּ֗א | Particle, Exhortation | Exodus 32:31 | 1 |
| אָ֣נָּ֡א | Particle, Exhortation | Genesis 50:17 | 1 |
| אָֽנָּ֤א | Particle, Exhortation | Nehemiah 1:5 | 1 |
| אָֽנָּ֥א | Particle, Exhortation | Psalms 118:25 | 1 |
| אָנָּ֣ה | Particle, Interjection | 2 Kings 20:3 | 1 |
| אָנָּ֤א | Particle, Exhortation | Daniel 9:4 | 1 |
| אָנָּ֥ה | Particle, Interjection | Psalms 116:4 | 1 |
| אָֽנָּ֣ה | Particle, Interjection | Psalms 116:16 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 12 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.
