אָנַן
to complain
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
- Hithpolel
- The reflexive counterpart of the Polel.
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would 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”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Hithpolel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Verb, Hithpolel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H596 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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
Lamentations 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.
“to complain” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb אנן (ʼânan). With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Numbers, which alone accounts for 50% of its uses. First canonically at Numbers 11:1, it enters the text early. See the sense tree, 2-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H596 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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
- Numbers 1 verse 50%
- Lamentations 1 verse 50%
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.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 50%
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: Complain 1×, Complained 1×
- American Standard Version: Complain 1×, Were as murmurers 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Began to complain 1×, Complain 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Complain 1×, Like those complaining 1×, Should 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H596 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H596 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H596 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H596 across 3 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- (Hithpael) complain, murmur
Word origin
[ אָנַן ] vb. only Hithpo. complain, murmur
— 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.
אֲנַן ²
- pl. of אֲנָא.
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.—
אָנַן
- , v. אָוֶן) to press, oppress, wrong, v. אָנָה.—אוֹנָן one who feels grieved, mourner, esp. Onan, mourner before the burial of a kinsman, contrad. to אָבֵל; v. אֲנִינָה. M. Kat. 14ᵇ מקדיב א׳ may officiate at sacrifices though being an Onan.—Pl. אוֹנָנִין. Snh. 47ᵇ לא היו מתאבלין אלא א׳ they observed no mourning ceremonies but lived in silent and retired mourning.—Fem. אוֹנֶנֶת. Keth. 53ᵃ.—Denom. אָנִין complaining, fastidious, feeble. Pl. אֲנִינֵי הדעת fastidious of taste, easily taking an aversion, delicate. Pes. 113ᵇ. Cmp. אִיסְתְּנִיס.
- to feel wronged, complain of being overreached, v. אָנָה.
אֲנַן
- to be grieved, to mourn. Targ. Koh. VII, 4.—Denom. אָנִין; f. אֲנִינָא, with דעתא = h. אָנִין, v. preced. Ḥull. 112ᵃ א׳ דעתיה he was fastidious, delicate. Ber. 24ᵇ; B. Bath. 23ᵃ א׳ דעתאי I am &c.
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 2 distinct written forms H596 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יִּתְאוֹנֵן֙ | Verb, Hithpolel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Lamentations 3:39 | 1 |
| כְּ/מִתְאֹ֣נְנִ֔ים | Verb, Hithpolel, Participle Active, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Numbers 11:1 | 1 |
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.
