שָׁפָן
rock badger
also: coney, the hyrax 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
Noun type
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
- 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.
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Proper 30 times (88%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 2 times (6%)
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute 2 times (6%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 34 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8227 appears — 28 distinct verses across 8 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.
Leviticus 1 verse
Deuteronomy 1 verse
2 Kings 7 verses
- 2 Kings 22:3 שָׁפָ֨ן n Proper It happened in the eighteenth year of king Josiah, that the king sent Shaphan, the son of Azaliah the son of Meshullam, the scribe, to the house of Yahweh, saying,
- 2 Kings 22:8 שָׁפָ֣ן שָׁפָ֖ן n Proper n Proper Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh. Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan, and he read it.
- 2 Kings 22:9 שָׁפָ֤ן n Proper Shaphan the scribe came to the king, and brought the king word again, and said, Your servants have emptied out the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of Yahweh.
- 2 Kings 22:10 שָׁפָ֤ן שָׁפָ֖ן n Proper n Proper Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has delivered me a book. Shaphan read it before the king.
- 2 Kings 22:12 שָׁ֠פָן שָׁפָ֣ן n Proper n Proper The king commanded Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Achbor the son of Micaiah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah the king's servant, saying,
- 2 Kings 22:14 וְ/שָׁפָ֣ן conj + n Proper So Hilkiah the priest, and Ahikam, and Achbor, and Shaphan, and Asaiah, went to Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum the son of Tikvah, the son of Harhas, keeper of the wardrobe (now she lived in Jerusalem in the second quarter); and they talked with her.
- 2 Kings 25:22 שָׁפָֽן n Proper As for the people who were left in the land of Judah, whom Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon had left, even over them he made Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, governor.
2 Chronicles 5 verses
- 2 Chronicles 34:8 שָׁפָ֨ן n Proper Now in the eighteenth year of his reign, when he had purged the land and the house, he sent Shaphan the son of Azaliah, and Maaseiah the governor of the city, and Joah the son of Joahaz the recorder, to repair the house of Yahweh his God.
- 2 Chronicles 34:15 שָׁפָ֣ן שָׁפָֽן n Proper n Proper Hilkiah answered Shaphan the scribe, I have found the book of the law in the house of Yahweh. Hilkiah delivered the book to Shaphan.
- 2 Chronicles 34:16 שָׁפָ֤ן n Proper Shaphan carried the book to the king, and moreover brought back word to the king, saying, All that was committed to your servants, they are doing.
- 2 Chronicles 34:18 שָׁפָ֤ן שָׁפָ֖ן n Proper n Proper Shaphan the scribe told the king, saying, Hilkiah the priest has delivered me a book. Shaphan read therein before the king.
- 2 Chronicles 34:20 שָׁ֠פָן שָׁפָ֣ן n Proper n Proper The king commanded Hilkiah, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Abdon the son of Micah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah the king's servant, saying,
Psalms 1 verse
Proverbs 1 verse
Jeremiah 11 verses
- Jeremiah 26:24 שָׁפָ֔ן n Proper But the hand of Ahikam the son of Shaphan was with Jeremiah, that they should not give him into the hand of the people to put him to death.
- Jeremiah 29:3 שָׁפָ֔ן n Proper by the hand of Elasah the son of Shaphan, and Gemariah the son of Hilkiah, (whom Zedekiah king of Judah sent to Babylon to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon), saying,
- Jeremiah 36:10 שָׁפָ֨ן n Proper Then read Baruch in the book the words of Jeremiah in the house of Yahweh, in the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan, the scribe, in the upper court, at the entry of the new gate of Yahweh's house, in the ears of all the people.
- Jeremiah 36:11 שָׁפָ֛ן n Proper When Micaiah the son of Gemariah, the son of Shaphan, had heard out of the book all the words of Yahweh,
- Jeremiah 36:12 שָׁפָ֛ן n Proper he went down into the king's house, into the scribe's chamber: and, behold, all the princes were sitting there, [to wit], Elishama the scribe, and Delaiah the son of Shemaiah, and Elnathan the son of Achbor, and Gemariah the son of Shaphan, and Zedekiah the son of Hananiah, and all the princes.
- Jeremiah 39:14 שָׁפָ֔ן n Proper they sent, and took Jeremiah out of the court of the guard, and committed him to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, that he should carry him home: so he lived among the people.
- Jeremiah 40:5 שָׁפָ֡ן n Proper Now while he was not yet gone back, Go back then, [said he], to Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan, whom the king of Babylon has made governor over the cities of Judah, and dwell with him among the people; or go wherever it seems right to you to go. So the captain of the guard gave him food and a present, and let him go.
- Jeremiah 40:9 שָׁפָן֙ n Proper Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan swore to them and to their men, saying, Don't be afraid to serve the Chaldeans: dwell in the land, and serve the king of Babylon, and it shall be well with you.
- Jeremiah 40:11 שָׁפָֽן n Proper Likewise when all the Jews who were in Moab, and among the children of Ammon, and in Edom, and who were in all the countries, heard that the king of Babylon had left a remnant of Judah, and that he had set over them Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan;
- Jeremiah 41:2 שָׁפָ֛ן n Proper Then arose Ishmael the son of Nethaniah, and the ten men who were with him, and struck Gedaliah the son of Ahikam the son of Shaphan with the sword, and killed him, whom the king of Babylon had made governor over the land.
- Jeremiah 43:6 שָׁפָ֑ן n Proper the men, and the women, and the children, and the king's daughters, and every person who Nebuzaradan the captain of the guard had left with Gedaliah the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan; and Jeremiah the prophet, and Baruch the son of Neriah;
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 word שפן centers on the idea of “rock badger.” Beyond “rock badger” it also covers “coney” and “the hyrax” — see its full sense range. It appears 28 verses across 8 books of the Hebrew Bible, among its moderately common vocabulary. The word gravitates to Jeremiah (39%), then 2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. Its earliest occurrence is Leviticus 11:5. Dig into 28-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8227 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 →
- 28
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 28 distinct verses.
- 8 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 8 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,041
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,041 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 28 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Jeremiah 11 verses 39%
- 2 Kings 7 verses 25%
- 2 Chronicles 5 verses 18%
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 28 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 19 verses · 68%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 7 verses · 25%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 7%
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).
BDB lists this Strong’s number as 2 distinct words (homographs). Each count above pools all of them and is not split by sense — see the Senses section below. A low-frequency rendering may belong to a different one of those words, not the primary meaning.
- King James Version†: Shaphan 30×, Coney 2×, Conies 2×
- American Standard Version†: Shaphan 30×, Coney 2×, Conies 2×
- Berean Standard Bible†: Shaphan 28×, Moreover shaphan 2×, Rock badger 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text†: Shaphan 20×, Rock badger 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8227 across 34† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8227 across 34† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8227 across 34† tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8227 across 24† 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.
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 5 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.
- 1. secretary (הַסֹּפֵר) under Josiah 2 K 22:3, 8(×2), 9, 10(×2), 12, 14; 2 Ch 34:8, 15(×2), 16, 18(×2), 20. e.g. 2 Kings 22:3
- 2. father of אֲחִיקָם, contemp. of 1 (improb. = 1): 2 K 22:12; 25:22; Je 26:24; 39:14; 40:5, 9, 11; 41:2; 43:6; 2 Ch 34:20. e.g. 2 Kings 22:12
- 3. father of אֶלְעָשָׂה Je 29:3, perhaps = 2. e.g. Jeremiah 29:3
- 4. father of גְּמַרְיָ֫הוּ 36:10 (called הַסֹּפֵר), v 11, 12, perhaps = 1. e.g. Jeremiah 36:10
- 5. father of יַאֲזַנְיָ֫הוּ Ez 8:11, possibly = 1. e.g. Ezekiel 8:11
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
I. n.m. Lv 11:5 rock-badger, hyrax syriacus, AV RV coney;—abs. שׁ׳ Dt 14:7 = Lv 11:5 (P; unclean animal); living in rocks, pl. שְׁפַנִּים ψ 104:18 Pr 30:26.—Vid. RobBR iii. 66, 387 TrNHB 75; FFP 1, and Pl. 1 Dr Dt PostHast. DB coney McLean-ShipleyEncy. Bib. id..
II. n.pr.m. Σαφ(φ)αν:
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from שפן (sâphan) (H8226) — to cover.
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.
שפן
- , a word in an incantation against thirst. Pes. 112ᵃ
שָׁפָן
- cony, (rock-badger). Midr. Prov. to XXX, 26 זה מדי כשם שהש׳ יש בו וכ׳ ‘the conies &c.’, this refers to Media, as the cony has the symptoms of cleanness (being a ruminant) and also those of uncleanness &c.; Lev. R. s. 13; Yalk. Prov. 964.
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 17 distinct written forms H8227 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| שָׁפָ֣ן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:15 | 4 |
| שָׁפָ֤ן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:16 | 4 |
| שָׁפָ֔ן | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 26:24 | 3 |
| שָׁפָ֖ן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:18 | 3 |
| שָׁפָ֛ן | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 36:11 | 3 |
| שָׁפָ֨ן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:8 | 3 |
| שָׁפָֽן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:15 | 3 |
| שָׁ֠פָן | Noun, Proper | 2 Chronicles 34:20 | 2 |
| הַ/שָּׁפָ֗ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Leviticus 11:5 | 1 |
| הַ/שָּׁפָ֜ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | Deuteronomy 14:7 | 1 |
| וְ/שָׁפָ֣ן | Noun, Proper | 2 Kings 22:14 | 1 |
| לַֽ/שְׁפַנִּֽים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Psalms 104:18 | 1 |
| שְׁ֭פַנִּים | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Proverbs 30:26 | 1 |
| שָׁפָ֑ן | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 43:6 | 1 |
| שָׁפָ֜ן | Noun, Proper | Ezekiel 8:11 | 1 |
| שָׁפָ֡ן | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 40:5 | 1 |
| שָׁפָן֙ | Noun, Proper | Jeremiah 40:9 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8227, 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.
Derives from
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 28 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 28 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
- Leviticus 11:5
- Deuteronomy 14:7
- 2 Kings 22:3
- 2 Chronicles 34:8
- Psalms 104:18
- Proverbs 30:26
- Jeremiah 26:24
- Ezekiel 8:11
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.
