פֶּחָה
governor
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Absolute-state word in the Hebrew Bible →
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
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
4 verses where H6346 appears in the Construct state in the Book of Nehemiah. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Nehemiah
- Nehemiah 2:7 פַּחֲו֖וֹת n c mp cs Moreover I said to the king, If it please the king, let letters be given me to the governors beyond the River, that they may let me pass through until I come to Judah;
- Nehemiah 2:9 פַּֽחֲווֹת֙ n c mp cs Then I came to the governors beyond the River, and gave them the king's letters. Now the king had sent with me captains of the army and horsemen.
- Nehemiah 3:7 פַּחַ֖ת n c ms cs Next to them repaired Melatiah the Gibeonite, and Jadon the Meronothite, the men of Gibeon, and of Mizpah, [that appertained] to the throne of the governor beyond the River.
- Nehemiah 5:14 פֶּחָ/ם֮ הַ/פֶּ֖חָה n c ms cs + sfx pers 3mp ptcl def.art + n c ms Moreover from the time that I was appointed to be their governor in the land of Judah, from the twentieth year even to the two and thirtieth year of Artaxerxes the king, [that is], twelve years, I and my brothers have not eaten the bread of the governor.
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.
“governor” is the headline sense of the Hebrew noun פחה (pechâh). First canonically at 1 Kings 10:15, it enters the text early. It turns up in 27 verses across 11 books, a moderately common footprint. It concentrates in Nehemiah, which alone accounts for 26% of its uses. From the same root come פחה. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6346 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 →
- 27
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 27 distinct verses.
- 11 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 11 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,190
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,190 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 27 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 27 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 15 verses · 56%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 12 verses · 44%
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: Governor 8×, Governors 7×, Captains 6×
- American Standard Version: Governors 13×, Governor 8×, Captain 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Governors 14×, Governor 8×, Allotted to the governor 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Governor 7×, Governors 6×, Governors of 5×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6346 across 28 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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 H6346 across 28 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.
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6346 across 28 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6346 across 27 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 3 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.
- governor
Word origin
n.m. 2 K 18:24 governor (loan-word from Assyrian paḫâti [abbrev. from bêl paḫâti], lord of a district; cf. perhaps Old Aramaic פחי governor);—abs. הַפּ׳ Ne 5:14, cstr. פַּחַ֫ת Hg 1:1 +, פַּחַת־ 2:21; sf. פֶּחָתֶ֑ךָ Mal 1:8, פֶּחֶם Ne 5:14 (but read prob. פֶּחָה); pl. abs. פַּחוֹת 1 K 20:24 +; cstr. פַּחוֹת 10:15 = 2 Ch 9:14, פַּחֲווֹת Ezr 8:36 +; sf. פַּחוֹתֶיהָ Je 51:28, 57;—as Assyrian captains 2 K 18:24 = Is 36:9 (פ׳, cf. StaZAW vi (1886), 182 al.), cf. Ez 23:6, 12; of Babylon Je 51:23, 57, and Bab. allies Ez 23:23; of Media Je 51:28; Pers. governor of עֵבֶר הַנָּהָר, i.e. in Pal., Hg 1:1, 14; 2:2, 21; Ne 2:7, 9 + 8 times; Pers. satraps in gen. Est 3:12; 8:9; 9:3; applied (by late writer) to Sol.’s governors 1 K 10:15 = 2 Ch 9:14; Benhadad’s captains 1 K 20:24 (del. v., Sta al.).—cf. Biblical Aramaic
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign origin
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.
פֶּחָה
- (b. h.; = בעל פ׳, v. Del. Assyr. Handw. p. 519; פחה to be large, grandee, high officer, governor. Y. Bets. IV, 62ᶜ (R. Ḥiya addressing Rab) בן פי׳ אחריהם son of nobility, follow them (the example of thy kindred)!—Pl. פַּחוֹת. Bicc. III, 3 הפ׳ הסגנים וכ׳ the grandees, the chiefs, and the treasurers (of the Temple) went out to meet them. Num. R. s. 14; a. e.
פֶּחָה ²
- , pl. פַּחְוָותָא ch. same. Targ. II Chr. IX, 14 ed. Beck (oth. ed. שלטוני).
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 23 distinct written forms H6346 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6346, 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 19 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 27 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
- 1 Kings 10:15
- 2 Kings 18:24
- 2 Chronicles 9:14
- Ezra 8:36
- Esther 3:12
- Isaiah 36:9
- Jeremiah 51:23
- Ezekiel 23:6
- Haggai 1:1
- Malachi 1:8
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.
