קָהָה
to be blunt
‘to be blunt’ is one of 3 main senses fuller range ↓
Full lexicon entry — Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
From Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB)
Where this word appears
See every Qal verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem. Here: ‘in sense of Qal’
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Plural 3 times (75%)
- Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (25%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 4 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6949 appears — 4 distinct verses across 3 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.
Ecclesiastes 1 verse
Jeremiah 2 verses
- Jeremiah 31:29 תִּקְהֶֽינָה Qal impf 3fp In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.
- Jeremiah 31:30 תִּקְהֶ֥ינָה Qal impf 3fp But everyone shall die for his own iniquity: every man who eats the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.
Ezekiel 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 verb קהה centers on the idea of “to be blunt.” The Hebrew Bible uses it only 4 verses. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (50%), then Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel. First canonically at Ecclesiastes 10:10, it enters the text early. As a verb its force shifts by stem, across 2 stems (Qal, Piel, and more). Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6949 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 3 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 3 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,696
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,696 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 2 verses 50%
- Ecclesiastes 1 verse 25%
- Ezekiel 1 verse 25%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 75%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 25%
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: Are set on edge 2×
- American Standard Version: Are set on edge 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Are set on edge 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Are made blunt 1×, Is dull 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6949 across 4 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6949 across 4 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 H6949 across 4 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 H6949 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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
- Impf. 3 fpl. תִּקְהֶינָה Je 31:29, 30 Ez 18:2 (all of teeth). e.g. Jeremiah 31:29
Piel
- in sense of Qal: Pf. 3 ms. קֵהָה Ec 10:10 if the iron be blunt. e.g. Ecclesiastes 10:10
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 blunt, dull (NH id.; Aramaic קְהָא, ܩܗܳܐ );—
— 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.
קָהָא
- , v. קהי
קֵהֶה
- , קֵהָה, קֵי׳ f. (preced.; cmp. כֵּהֶה) dull, faint;
- 1. (of cutting tools) blunt; (of teeth) blunt and loose. — Pl. קֵהִים, קֵהִין, קֵי׳; קֵהוֹת, קֵי׳. Midr. Sam. ch. XVI as with the grape vine כל מי … שיניו ק׳ וכ׳ he that eats of its unripe fruit, will have his teeth set on edge, so it is with Israel &c.; Lev. R. s. 36 (corr. version after Midr. Sam.).
- 2. (of limbs) wearied, benumbed. Y. Yoma VIII, 44ᵈ בבא מן … ק׳ עליו in the case of one that had come from a journey, and his feet were benumbed; Y. Ber. II, 5ᵇ bot.; a. e.
- 3. tough, hard, unyielding. Taan. 7ᵇ (ref. to Koh. X, 10) אם ראית רקיע שק׳ כברזל וכ׳ when thou seest the sky as tough as iron not sending down dew or rain; Yalk. Koh. 979 אם … דור שהשמים קהין וכ׳ when thou seest a generation over which the heavens are as tough &c. Ab. IV, 20 ענבים קהות hard (unripe) grapes, opp. בשולות.—Trnsf. (of intellectual subjects) tough, difficult, unsolvable. Yalk. l. c. אם … שתלמודו ק׳ עליו כברזל when thou seest a student to whom his lesson is as tough as iron (Taan. 8ᵃ שלמודו קשה; Ms. M. כהה). Pesik. R. s. 33 והמעשה שהיה ק׳ וכ׳ and when a case was too difficult for me to decide, I asked &c.; Yalk. Job 917. Cant. R. to IV, 11; a. e. e.g. Ecclesiastes 10:10
- 4. fainting, having a morbid appetite. Y. Shebi. IV, end, 35ᶜ שכן דרך הק׳ אוכלות אותו for craving women are in the habit of eating it (the unripe grape).
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 3 distinct written forms H6949 takes in the Hebrew Bible, most frequent first — each parse links to that stem’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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| תִּקְהֶֽינָה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Plural | Ezekiel 18:2 | 2 |
| קֵהָ֣ה | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Ecclesiastes 10:10 | 1 |
| תִּקְהֶ֥ינָה | Verb, Qal, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Plural | Jeremiah 31:30 | 1 |
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 4 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.
