פֶּתַע
suddenness
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
- Adverb
- A word that modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb.
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
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 4 times (57%)
- Adverb 3 times (43%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 7 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6621 appears — 7 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.
Numbers 2 verses
- Numbers 6:9 בְּ/פֶ֣תַע prep + n c ms "If any man dies very suddenly beside him, and he defiles the head of his separation; then he shall shave his head in the day of his cleansing. On the seventh day he shall shave it.
- Numbers 35:22 בְּ/פֶ֥תַע prep + n c ms But if he thrust him suddenly without enmity, or hurled on him anything without lying in wait,
Proverbs 2 verses
Isaiah 2 verses
- Isaiah 29:5 לְ/פֶ֥תַע prep + n c ms But the multitude of your foes shall be like small dust, and the multitude of the awesome ones as chaff that passes away: yes, it shall be in an instant suddenly.
- Isaiah 30:13 לְ/פֶ֖תַע prep + n c ms therefore this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking comes suddenly in an instant.
Habakkuk 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 word פתע centers on the idea of “suddenness.” Debuting at Numbers 6:9, it then recurs through the corpus. It appears 7 verses across 4 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its uncommon vocabulary. The word gravitates to Numbers (29%), then Proverbs and Isaiah. It shares a root with פתאום. Dig into 7-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6621 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 →
- 7
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 7 distinct verses.
- 4 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 4 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #2,835
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,835 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 7 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 7 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 29%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 29%
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: Suddenly 3×
- American Standard Version: Suddenly 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Instant 3×, Suddenly 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Suddenly 3×, Instant 2×, Suddenness 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6621 across 7 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6621 across 7 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 H6621 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6621 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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.
- suddenness, in an instant
Word origin
subst. suddenness (√ unknown: cf. Assyrian ina pitti, ina pittimma, in suddenness, instantly, DlHWB 553):—Nu 35:22 וְאִם־בְּפֶתַע … הֲדָפוֹ if he have thrust him in suddenness, before he is aware what he has done (i.e. accidentally); + פִּתְאֹם Nu 6:9, וכי ימות מת עליו בפתע פתאם i.e. very suddenly; לְפֶתַע according to (לְ, p. 516b) suddenness, Is 29:5 והיה לפתע פתאם = at an instant, suddenly, 30:13 אשׁר פתאם לפתע יבוא שִׁבְרָהּ. As adv. acc., suddenly, Pr 6:15 (= 29:1) פֶּתַע יִשָּׁבֵר, Hb 2:7.
— 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 open (the eyes)
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.
פֶּתַע
- (b. h.) coming unawares, sudden. Num. R. s. 10, v. פִּתְאוֹם.
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 H6621 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| פֶּ֥תַע | Adverb | Proverbs 6:15 | 2 |
| בְּ/פֶ֣תַע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 6:9 | 1 |
| בְּ/פֶ֥תַע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Numbers 35:22 | 1 |
| לְ/פֶ֖תַע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 30:13 | 1 |
| לְ/פֶ֥תַע | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Isaiah 29:5 | 1 |
| פֶ֗תַע | Adverb | Habakkuk 2:7 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6621, 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 7 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 7 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.
