אָנַשׁ
to be sick
‘to be sick’ is one of 2 main senses fuller range ↓
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
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Stem
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
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.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 6 times (67%)
- Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (22%)
- Verb, Niphal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (11%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 9 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H605 appears — 9 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.
2 Samuel 1 verse
Job 1 verse
Isaiah 1 verse
Jeremiah 5 verses
- Jeremiah 15:18 אֲנוּשָׁ֑ה֙ adj Adjective fs Why is my pain perpetual, and my wound incurable, which refuses to be healed? will you indeed be to me as a deceitful [brook], as waters that fail?
- Jeremiah 17:9 וְ/אָנֻ֣שׁ conj + Adjective Adjective ms The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is exceedingly corrupt: who can know it?
- Jeremiah 17:16 אָנ֛וּשׁ adj Adjective ms As for me, I have not hurried from being a shepherd after you; neither have I desired the woeful day; you know: that which came out of my lips was before your face.
- Jeremiah 30:12 אָנ֣וּשׁ adj Adjective ms For thus says Yahweh, Your hurt is incurable, and your wound grievous.
- Jeremiah 30:15 אָנ֖וּשׁ adj Adjective ms Why cry you for your hurt? your pain is incurable: for the greatness of your iniquity, because your sins were increased, I have done these things to you.
Micah 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 be sick” is the headline sense of the Hebrew verb אנש (ʼânash). More than half of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 9 verses — uncommon. Its earliest occurrence is 2 Samuel 12:15. Read the stem: it spans 2 stems, including Qal and Niphal. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H605 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.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #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 →
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 9 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 8 verses · 89%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 11%
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 incurable 4×
- American Standard Version: Is incurable 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is incurable 3×, Incurable 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Incurable 2×, Is incurable 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H605 across 9 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 5 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 H605 across 9 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 H605 across 9 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H605 across 8 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 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 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.
Qal
- Pt. pass. אָנוּשׁ Jb 34:6 +; אֲנוּשָׁה Je 15:18; Mi 1:9 & so read ψ 69:21 (Bi Che) etc.; as adj. incurable, of wound, but metaph. (מַכָּה) Mi 1:9; Je 15:18; cf. Jb 34:6 (חֵץ), Je 30:12 (שֵׁבֶר; ‖ נַחְלָה מַכָּה); so כְּאֵב אָנוּשׁ Is 17:11; cf. Je 30:15 (מַכְאֹב); cf. יוֹם אָנוּשׁ 17:16; also in phr. עָקֹב הַלֵּב מִכֹּל וְאָנֻשׁ הוּא Je 17:9. e.g. Job 34:6
Niphal
- Impf. וַיֵּאָנַ֑֯שׁ 2 S 12:15 be sick, of child. e.g. 2 Samuel 12:15
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
vb. be weak, sick (Assyrian anâšu ZimBP 56, 70; Wetzst in DePsalmen, ed. 4, 882 der. from II. אנשׁ per antiphrasin; DlPr 160 identified with III. אנשׁ; v. also DePsalmen, ed. 4, 904; so LagBN 60, who comp. سَيْف أَنِيث, weichliches d.h. stumpfes Schwert. It seems safer at present to keep the three distinct).
— 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.
אֱנָשׁ
- , v. אִינָשׁ
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 8 distinct written forms H605 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| אָנ֖וּשׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 30:15 | 2 |
| אֲנוּשָׁ֑ה֙ | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 15:18 | 1 |
| אֲנוּשָׁ֖ה | Adjective, Adjective, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Micah 1:9 | 1 |
| אָנ֛וּשׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 17:16 | 1 |
| אָנ֣וּשׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 30:12 | 1 |
| אָנֽוּשׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 17:11 | 1 |
| וְ/אָנֻ֣שׁ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 17:9 | 1 |
| וַ/יֵּאָנַֽשׁ | Verb, Niphal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 2 Samuel 12:15 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H605, 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.
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → 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.
