קִנֵּן
to nest
‘to nest’ 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 Piel verb in the Hebrew Bible →
Grammar key — what these labels mean
Part of speech
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Pual
- The passive counterpart of the Piel.
- Piel
- An intensive or resultative active stem.
Form
- Participle Passive
- A verbal adjective expressing action received (“written”).
- 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”).
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
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
1 verse where H7077 appears in the Pual stem in the Book of Jeremiah. Filtered view — show all forms. 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.
Jeremiah
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.
קנן — transliterated qânan — is a Hebrew verb carrying the sense “to nest.” A scarce word — 5 verses in all of the Hebrew Bible. More than a third of its appearances fall in Jeremiah. Debuting at Psalms 104:17, it then recurs through the corpus. The lexicon spreads it across several senses; see its full sense range. Each statement above links to its evidence; the full detail follows below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7077 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 →
- 5
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 5 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 5 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 5 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 4 verses · 80%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 20%
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: Made their nests 1×, Make her nest 1×, Make their nests 1×
- American Standard Version: Made their nests 1×, Make her nest 1×, Make their nests 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Build their nests 1×, Make her nest 1×, Nested 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Make their nests 1×, Nested in 1×, Will nest 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7077 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7077 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7077 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7077 across 4 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
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 1 sense 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.
Pual
- . (thou) who art nested in the cedars (fig.).
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
[ קִנֵּן ] vb. denom. Pi. make a nest, nest
— 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.
קָנַן
- (b. h.) to put up, build (cmp. כָּנַן).—Denom. קֵן.
- (denom. of קֵן) to build a nest, to nest. Y. Peah VII, 20ᵇ top; Keth. 111ᵇ, v. לֶפֶת. Cant. R. to II, 14 ומצא … מְקַנֵּן and found there a serpent nesting; a. e.—Part. pass. מְקוּנָּן. Yalk. Gen. 62 (Gen. R. s. 37 מְכוּנָּן), v. כָּנַן.
קְנַן
- , Pa. קַנֵּין ch. same. Targ. Is. XXXIV, 15.
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 H7077 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| יְקַנֵּ֑נוּ | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Plural | Psalms 104:17 | 1 |
| מְקֻנַּ֖נְתְּ | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 22:23 | 1 |
| מקננתי | Verb, Pual, Participle Passive, Feminine, Singular, Absolute | Jeremiah 22:23 | 1 |
| קִֽנְנוּ֙ | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Common, Plural | Ezekiel 31:6 | 1 |
| קִנְּנָ֤ה | Verb, Piel, Perfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Isaiah 34:15 | 1 |
| תְּקַנֵּ֖ן | Verb, Piel, Imperfect, 3rd Person, Feminine, Singular | Jeremiah 48:28 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7077, 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 4 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 5 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.
