רָדַם
to sleep
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
- Niphal
- Usually the simple passive or reflexive of the Qal (“he was written”).
Form
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- 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”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 5 times (71%)
- Verb, Niphal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular 1 time (14%)
- Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular 1 time (14%)
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 H7290 appears — 7 distinct verses across 5 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.
Judges 1 verse
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Daniel 2 verses
- Daniel 8:18 נִרְדַּ֥מְתִּי Niphal pf 1cs Now as he was speaking with me, I fell into a deep sleep with my face toward the ground; but he touched me, and set me upright.
- Daniel 10:9 נִרְדָּ֥ם Niphal ptcp.act ms Yet heard I the voice of his words; and when I heard the voice of his words, then was I fallen into a deep sleep on my face, with my face toward the ground.
Jonah 2 verses
- Jonah 1:5 וַ/יֵּרָדַֽם conj + Niphal wimpf 3ms Then the mariners were afraid, and cried every man to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it. But Jonah had gone down into the innermost parts of the ship, and he was laying down, and was fast asleep.
- Jonah 1:6 נִרְדָּ֑ם Niphal ptcp.act ms So the shipmaster came to him, and said to him, "What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call on your gods! Maybe the gods will notice us, so that we won't perish."
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 רדם centers on the idea of “to sleep.” First canonically at Judges 4:21, it enters the text early. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 7 verses — uncommon. Daniel dominates its distribution — 2 of 7 verses. Related forms include תרדמה. For the data behind this summary, explore the sense tree and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H7290 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.
- 5 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 5 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.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 4 verses · 57%
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 3 verses · 43%
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 cast into a dead sleep 1×, He that sleepeth 1×, He was fast asleep 1×
- American Standard Version: Are cast into a deep sleep 1×, He that sleepeth 1×, He was in a deep sleep 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Fell into a deep sleep 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Deep sleep 1×, Fell 1×, Fell deeply asleep 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H7290 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H7290 across 7 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H7290 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.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H7290 across 8 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.
- (Niphal) to be asleep, be unconscious, be in heavy sleep, fall into heavy sleep, be fast asleep
Word origin
[ רָדַם ] vb. Niph. be in, or fall into, heavy sleep
— 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.
רָדַם
- (b. h.) to benumb. Part. pass. רָדוּם; pl. רְדוּמִים fast asleep. Esth. R. to III, 9 עד … ר׳ בשינה how long yet will (you) the fathers of the world be sunk in sleep?
- to be overcome by sleep. Pes. X, 8 (120ᵇ) נִרְדְּמוּ לא וכ׳ if they have been fast asleep, at the end of the Passover meal, they dare not eat again, opp. נתנמנמו. Tanḥ. Vayikra 8 יונה … נ׳ וישן Jonah, in the anguish of his soul, was overcome and fell asleep. Ib. אנו … ואתה נִרְדָּם we are standing between life and death, and thou art asleep?
רְדַם
- ; part. pass. רָדִים; pl. רְדִימִין. Targ. Is. XV, 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 5 distinct written forms H7290 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| נִרְדָּ֥ם | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Daniel 10:9 | 3 |
| וַ/יֵּרָדַֽם | Verb, Niphal, Sequential Imperfect, 3rd Person, Masculine, Singular | Jonah 1:5 | 1 |
| נִ֝רְדָּ֗ם | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Psalms 76:6 | 1 |
| נִרְדַּ֥מְתִּי | Verb, Niphal, Perfect, 1st Person, Common, Singular | Daniel 8:18 | 1 |
| נִרְדָּ֑ם | Verb, Niphal, Participle Active, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Jonah 1:6 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H7290, 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.
