עֲנָוָה
meekness
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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H6038 appears — 4 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.
Proverbs 3 verses
- Proverbs 15:33 עֲנָוָֽה n c fs The fear of Yahweh teaches wisdom. Before honor is humility.
- Proverbs 18:12 עֲנָוָֽה n c fs Before destruction the heart of man is proud, But before honor is humility.
- Proverbs 22:4 עֲ֭נָוָה n c fs The result of humility and the fear of Yahweh Is wealth, honor, and life.
Zephaniah 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.
“meekness” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun ענוה (ʻănâvâh). It is rare — just 4 verses in the entire Hebrew Bible. It clusters heavily in Proverbs, which alone accounts for 75% of its uses. Its earliest occurrence is Proverbs 15:33. It clusters with ענו and ענוה under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6038 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 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 →
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) 3 verses · 75%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 25%
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: Is humility 2×
- American Standard Version: Goeth humility 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Humility 4×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Humility 3×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6038 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. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6038 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6038 across 5 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 H6038 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.
Senses in the full BDB
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 2 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. humility, meekness ψ 45:5 (dub.), Pr 15:33; 18:12; 22:4 Zp 2:3 (prob. gloss, v. We Now). e.g. Psalms 45:5
- 2. condescension ψ 18:36 (dub., v. supr.). e.g. Psalms 18:36
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
n.f. humility;—ע׳ Pr 15:33 + 3 times; עַנְוָה־ (contr. because of Maqqeph, see BrMP) ψ 45:5; עַנְוָֽתְךָ ψ 18:36 (= עֲנֹתְךָ 2 S 22:36 v. I. ענה; read עֶזְרָֽתְךְ Ol We);—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from ענו (ʻânâv) (H6035) — poor.
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.
ענָוָה I
- (עָנָה I) divine response to prayer, yield, fertility; (Maim. refers to Hos. II, 23, sq.). Peah I, 2; ib. VI, 7, v. עֲנָבָה 2; a. e. e.g. Hosea 2:23
עֲנָוָה II
- humility, lowliness, meekness, kindness. Sot. IX, 15 (49ᵃ) משמת רבי בטלה ע׳ וכ׳ with Rabbi’s death ceased humility and fear of sin. Ib. 49ᵇ לא תיתני ע׳ דאיכא אנא do not read (in the Mishnah) ‘humility’, for there am I (striving after it). Arakh. 16ᵇ ע׳ שלא לשמה humility not for its own sake (e.g. you forbear to rebuke a friend, making yourself believe that you are unworthy to do so, whereas in fact you only fear to incur your friend’s ill will). Y. Shek. II, end, 47ᶜ קדושה מביאה לידי ע׳ ע׳ מביאה לידי יראת חטא holiness leads to meekness, meekness leads to fear of sin; Ab. Zar. 20ᵇ. Ib. ע׳ גדולה מכולן humility is the greatest virtue of all. Ab. d’R. N. ch. VII למד בני ביתך ע׳ (not למוד) train the members of thy household to be kind (to strangers). Der. Er. Zutta, ch. V הדר חכמה ע׳ הדר ע׳ יראה the beauty of wisdom is modesty, the beauty of modesty is fear of sin. Tanḥ. Bresh. 1; Y. Sabb. I, 3ᶜ top, a. e., v. סוּלְיָיס; a. fr.
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 4 distinct written forms H6038 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| עֲ֭נָוָה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 22:4 | 1 |
| עֲנָוָ֔ה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Zephaniah 2:3 | 1 |
| עֲנָוָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 15:33 | 1 |
| עֲנָוָֽה | Noun, Common, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Proverbs 18:12 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6038, 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
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
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.
