קִינֵן
to lament
‘to lament’ 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Polel
- A stem of hollow/geminate roots functioning like the Piel — intensive active.
Form
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Person
- 3rd Person
- The one spoken about (“he / she / it / they”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Polel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 3 times (38%)
- Verb, Polel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Plural 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Polel, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural 2 times (25%)
- Verb, Polel, Participle Active, Feminine, Plural, Absolute 1 time (13%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 8 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H6969 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.
2 Samuel 2 verses
2 Chronicles 1 verse
Jeremiah 1 verse
Ezekiel 2 verses
- Ezekiel 27:32 וְ/קוֹנְנ֖וּ conj + Polel wpf 3cp In their wailing they shall take up a lamentation for you, and lament over you, [saying], Who is there like Tyre, like her who is brought to silence in the midst of the sea?
- Ezekiel 32:16 וְ/ק֣וֹנְנ֔וּ/הָ תְּקוֹנֵ֣נָּה תְּקוֹנֵ֣נָּה conj + Polel wpf 3cp + sfx pers 3fs Polel impf 3fp Polel impf 3fp This is the lamentation with which they shall lament; the daughters of the nations shall lament therewith; over Egypt, and over all her multitude, shall they lament therewith, says the Lord Yahweh.
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.
קון — transliterated qûwn — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to lament.” Debuting at 2 Samuel 1:17, it then recurs through the corpus. Spanning 6 verses in 4 books, it ranks among the uncommon words of the Hebrew Bible. Its uses concentrate in 2 Samuel (33% of all occurrences). Its lexical range runs to 2 senses. See the sense tree, 6-verse concordance, and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H6969 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.
- #2,625
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 2,625 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 6 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- 2 Samuel 2 verses 33%
- Ezekiel 2 verses 33%
- 2 Chronicles 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.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 5 verses · 83%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 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: Lamented 3×
- American Standard Version: Lamented 3×
- Berean Standard Bible: Is the lament 1×, Lamented 1×, Mourn 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: And 2×, Lamented 2×, Will lament 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H6969 across 8 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.
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H6969 across 8 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 H6969 across 8 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H6969 across 11 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.
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.
- to chant a dirge, chant, wail, lament
- (Polel) to lament
Word origin
[ קִינֵן ] vb. denom. Pō‛l. chant a קִינָה
— 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.
קוּן
- to arrange, order, plan (applied to art, cmp. חָרַשׁ; to music, v. קִינָה).
- to arrange a song of lamentation (ḳinah, cmp. קשר הספד, v. הֶסְפֵּד). Gitt. 58ᵃ עליה ק׳ ירמיהו וכ׳ on her account Jeremiah sang &c. Ib. ועליהן קינה וכ׳ (corr. acc.; v. En Yaʿăḳob). Lam. R. introd. (R. Naḥman) התחיל … מְקוֹנֵן עליהם איכה Jeremiah began to sing Ekhah (Lam. I, 1) over them. Ib. (R. Pinḥas) הרי … מקונן עליכם קינות וכ׳ behold, Jeremiah will sing lamentations of seven alphabets (of) Ekhah over you. M. Kat. III, 9 אבל לא מְקוֹנְנוֹת but they (the lamenting women) must not sing dirges, v. קִינָה a. עִינּוּי I; a. fr. e.g. Lamentations 1:1
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 7 distinct written forms H6969 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| תְּקוֹנֵ֣נָּה | Verb, Polel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Plural | Ezekiel 32:16 | 2 |
| וְ/ק֣וֹנְנ֔וּ/הָ | Verb, Polel, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Ezekiel 32:16 | 1 |
| וְ/קוֹנְנ֖וּ | Verb, Polel, Sequential Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Ezekiel 27:32 | 1 |
| וַ/יְקֹנֵ֣ן | Verb, Polel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 2 Samuel 1:17 | 1 |
| וַ/יְקֹנֵ֥ן | Verb, Polel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 2 Samuel 3:33 | 1 |
| וַ/יְקוֹנֵ֣ן | Verb, Polel, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | 2 Chronicles 35:25 | 1 |
| לַ/מְקוֹנְנ֖וֹת | Verb, Polel, Participle Active, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Jeremiah 9:17 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H6969, 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
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 → 1 of the same-root words is a proper name (a person or place). 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.
