פֶּן־
lest
also: not, beware lest 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
- Conjunction
- A joining word (e.g. “and,” “but”) linking words or clauses.
Every verse where H6435 appears in the Book of Genesis — 17 distinct verses. 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.
Genesis
- Genesis 3:3 פֶּן conj but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, 'You shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.'"
- Genesis 3:22 פֶּן conj Yahweh God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand, and also take of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever..."
- Genesis 11:4 פֶּן conj They said, "Come, let's build us a city, and a tower, whose top reaches to the sky, and let's make us a name; lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth."
- Genesis 19:15 פֶּן conj When the morning arose, then the angels hurried Lot, saying, "Arise, take your wife, and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the iniquity of the city."
- Genesis 19:17 פֶּן conj It came to pass, when they had taken them out, that he said, "Escape for your life! Don't look behind you, neither stay anywhere in the plain. Escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed!"
- Genesis 19:19 פֶּן conj See now, your servant has found favor in your sight, and you have magnified your loving kindness, which you have shown to me in saving my life. I can't escape to the mountain, lest evil overtake me, and I die.
- Genesis 24:6 פֶּן conj Abraham said to him, "Beware that you don't bring my son there again.
- Genesis 26:7 פֶּן conj The men of the place asked him about his wife. He said, "She is my sister," for he was afraid to say, "My wife," lest, he thought, the men of the place might kill me for Rebekah, because she was beautiful to look on.
- Genesis 26:9 פֶּן conj Abimelech called Isaac, and said, "Behold, surely she is your wife. Why did you say, 'She is my sister?'" Isaac said to him, "Because I said, 'Lest I die because of her.'"
- Genesis 31:24 פֶּן conj God came to Laban, the Syrian, in a dream of the night, and said to him, "Take heed to yourself that you don't speak to Jacob either good or bad."
- Genesis 31:31 פֶּן conj Jacob answered Laban, "Because I was afraid, for I said, 'Lest you should take your daughters from me by force.'
- Genesis 32:11 פֶּן conj Please deliver me from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he come and strike me, and the mothers with the children.
- Genesis 38:11 פֶּן conj Then Judah said to Tamar, his daughter-in-law, "Remain a widow in your father's house, until Shelah, my son, is grown up;" for he said, "Lest he also die, like his brothers." Tamar went and lived in her father's house.
- Genesis 38:23 פֶּ֖ן conj Judah said, "Let her keep it, lest we be shamed. Behold, I sent this kid, and you haven't found her."
- Genesis 42:4 פֶּן conj But Jacob didn't send Benjamin, Joseph's brother, with his brothers; for he said, "Lest perhaps harm happen to him."
- Genesis 44:34 פֶּ֚ן conj For how will I go up to my father, if the boy isn't with me? Lest I see the evil that will come on my father."
- Genesis 45:11 פֶּן conj There I will nourish you; for there are yet five years of famine; lest you come to poverty, you, and your household, and all that you have."'
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.
פן (pên) is a Hebrew word most often rendered “lest.” Debuting at Genesis 3:3, it then recurs through the corpus. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 125 verses — common. It also covers “not” and “beware lest”, alongside “lest” — see its full sense range. Related forms include פנה, פנים and יפנה. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6435 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 →
- 125
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 125 distinct verses.
- 20 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 20 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #339
- by frequency
- Top 500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 339 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 125 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Deuteronomy 24 verses 19%
- Genesis 17 verses 14%
- Proverbs 17 verses 14%
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 125 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 57 verses · 46%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 38 verses · 30%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 30 verses · 24%
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: Lest 1×, Lest peradventure 1×, Not 1×
- American Standard Version: Lest 1×, Lest peradventure 1×, Not 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Or 38×, Lest 21×, Otherwise 19×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Lest 110×, That 11×, Not 10×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6435 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6435 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H6435 across 124 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 22 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 8 further occurrences.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6435 across 142 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 9 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
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. with impf.
- 2. with Pf., the result feared being conceived as having possibly already taken place
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
פֶּן־ 133 (alw. with Makkeph) conj. (adverting or deprecating), lest
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from פנה (pânâh) (H6437) — to turn.
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.
פן
- , Targ. Jon. I, 8 some ed. ומפן, read ומנן, v. מְנָן
פֶּן
- [eventually,] lest. Zeb. 106ᵃ כל מקום שנאמר השמר פן ואל וכ׳ wherever the Scripture has ‘be guarded, lest’, or al, it introduces a prohibitory law (v. עָשָׂה); Sot. 5ᵃ, a. fr. Sifré Deut. 70, quot. in Yalk. ib. 882 השמר בלא תעשה פן בלא תעשה ‘be guarded’ means a prohibitory law, and so does ‘lest’.
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 9 distinct written forms H6435 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| פֶּן | Conjunction | Amos 5:6 | 97 |
| פֶּֽן | Conjunction | Deuteronomy 4:23 | 19 |
| פֶּ֚ן | Conjunction | Deuteronomy 7:25 | 6 |
| וּ/פֶן | Conjunction | Deuteronomy 4:9 | 4 |
| פֶּ֥ן | Conjunction | Deuteronomy 11:16 | 2 |
| פֶּ֨ן | Conjunction | Deuteronomy 4:16 | 2 |
| וּ/פֶֽן | Conjunction | Proverbs 30:9 | 1 |
| פֶּ֖ן | Conjunction | Genesis 38:23 | 1 |
| פֶּ֣ן | Conjunction | Proverbs 25:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6435, 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
Proper names from this root
People and places named from this root — a name, not an additional meaning of the word.
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. 2 of the same-root words are proper names (people or places). They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 121 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 125 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
- Genesis 3:3
- Exodus 1:10
- Leviticus 10:7
- Numbers 16:26
- Deuteronomy 4:9
- Joshua 2:16
- Judges 7:2
- Ruth 4:6
- 1 Samuel 4:9
- 2 Samuel 1:20
- 2 Kings 2:16
- 1 Chronicles 10:4
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.
