פֶּ֫תֶן
serpent
‘serpent’ 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
- 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
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 3 times (50%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 3 times (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 6 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6620 appears — 6 distinct verses across 4 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.
Deuteronomy 1 verse
Job 2 verses
Psalms 2 verses
Isaiah 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.
The Hebrew noun פתן centers on the idea of “serpent.” First canonically at Deuteronomy 32:33, it enters the text early. It turns up in 6 verses across 4 books, an uncommon footprint. The word gravitates to Job (33%), then Psalms and Deuteronomy. Lexicons map it across 2 senses. Dig into 6-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6620 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 →
- 6
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 6 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,040
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,040 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Job 2 verses 33%
- Psalms 2 verses 33%
- Deuteronomy 1 verse 17%
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 6 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 67%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 1 verse · 17%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 17%
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: Asps 3×, Adder 2×
- American Standard Version: Asps 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Cobras 3×, Cobra 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Adder 3×, Asps 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6620 across 6 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6620 across 5 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 H6620 across 6 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 H6620 across 7 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.
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- a snake, venomous serpent
- perhaps the cobra, adder, or viper
Word origin
n.m. ψ 58:5 a venomous serpent, perhaps cobra (פתן Ecclus 39:30; Aramaic פִּתְנָא, ܦܰܬܳܢܳܐ, whence perhaps Arabic بَثَنٌ );—only poet.: pl. רֹאשׁ פְּתָנִים Dt 32:33 (‖ חֲמַת תַּנִּינִם), Jb 20:16, מְרוֹרַת פ׳ v 14; sg. פֶּ֫תֶן ψ 91:13 (‖ תַּנִּין), פ׳ חֵרֵשׁ 58:5, חֻר פָּ֑תֶן Is 11:8.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: from an unused root meaning to twist
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.
פתן
- , Tosef. Kel. B. Bath. IV, 8, read: כַּתָּן.
פֶּתֶן
- , to wind) asp, adder. Num. R. s. 19 אפי׳ נְשׁוּךְ פ׳ ועקרב וכ׳ even he who was bitten by an asp or a scorpion, &c. (was cured when looking at the brazen serpent); Yalk. ib. 764; Tanḥ. Ḥuck. 19 נשוך מפ׳ וכ׳. Sifré Deut. 323 (ref. to Deut. XXXII, 33) [read:] אלו הראשונים שבכם שהם כפ׳ הזה אכזרי that means the foremost among you who are like the asp, the cruel; Yalk. ib. 946; a. e.—Pl. פְּתָנִים. Pirké d’R. El. ch. XIV מרורת פ׳ ומות וכ׳ the venom of asps and death are in its (the serpent’s) mouth; Yalk. Gen. 27. e.g. Deuteronomy 32:33
פֶּתֶן ²
- Targ. Is. XI, 8 חוי פתן (ed. Wil. פָּתָן) a winding serpent (h. text פתן). Targ. O. Gen. XLIX, 17 (h. text שפיפן); a. e.—Pl. פִּתְנִין, פִּי׳. Targ. O. Deut. XXXII, 33 ed. Berl. (oth. ed. פִּתְנֵי, פַּתְנֵי, פֵּתָנֵי; Y. I פִּיתוּנַיָּא; v. פתמנאי).
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 6 distinct written forms H6620 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| וָ/פֶ֣תֶן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 91:13 | 1 |
| פֶ֥תֶן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 58:4 | 1 |
| פְּתָנִ֖ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Deuteronomy 32:33 | 1 |
| פְּתָנִ֣ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 20:14 | 1 |
| פְּתָנִ֥ים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Job 20:16 | 1 |
| פָּ֑תֶן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 11:8 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6620, 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 6 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 6 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.
