תָּאַב
to long for
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
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
Form
- Perfect
- A completed action or state — Hebrew marks aspect (completeness) more than strict tense (“he wrote”).
Person
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H8373 appears — 2 distinct verses across 1 book. 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.
Psalms 2 verses
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.
תאב (tâʼab) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to long for.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. It clusters heavily in Psalms, which alone accounts for 100% of its uses. Scripture first uses it in Psalms 119:40. It clusters with תאב under a shared root. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8373 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 →
- 2
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 2 distinct verses.
- 1 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 1 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,807
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,807 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Psalms 2 verses 100%
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 2 distinct verses.
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 100%
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: Behold i have longed 1×, I have longed 1×
- American Standard Version: Behold 1×, I have longed 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: I long 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: I long 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8373 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8373 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8373 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8373 across 2 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.
- (Qal) to long for
Word origin
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.
תָּאַב
- Tafel of אָבָה) to desire, have an appetite for; to want. Ex. R. s. 1, beg. ת׳ מיתת אביו he wished for his father’s death; Tanḥ. Sh’moth 1. Y. Snh. II, 20ᵃ bot. תָּאַבְתָּ דבר … שאני מַתְאִיבְךָ וכ׳ thou didst desire something forbidden to thee, I will make thee desire something permitted to thee.—Yeb. 15ᵃ תאבני, v. תָּאֵב.
- to cause to desire. Y. Snh. l. c., v. supra.
תְּאֵב
- Targ. Ps. LXXXIV, 3.—Part. תָּאֵיב; f. תְּאֵיבָא &c. Targ. Ruth. I, 16. Targ. Hos. XIII, 5 תְּאֵיבִין (ed. Wil. תָּאֲבִין).
תְּאֵב ²
- II, v. תּוּב I
תָּאֵב
- (תָּאַב) desirous, longing for. Y. Ned. IX, beg. 41ᵇ אין היצר הרע ת׳ אלא וכ׳ the evil inclination has a desire only for what is forbidden; Y. Yoma VI, 43ᵈ top תָּעֵב. Tosef. Arakh. IV, 26 והוא ת׳ לו (not והלא) while he has an appetite for it. Y. Ber. VII, 11ᵃ bot. מה אם … שהוא ת׳ לאכול וכ׳ if man must bless God after he has eaten and is satisfied, how much more must he do so, when he is desirous to eat (and finds what he needs)!; (Bab. ib. 48ᵇ כשהוא רעב). Pes. 99ᵇ כדי … כשהוא ת׳ Ar. a. Ms. M. 2 (v. Rabb. D. S. a. l. note 5; ed. כשהוא תאוה, read: תָּאֵו; Y. ib. X, beg. 37ᵇ בתאוה) that he may enter the Sabbath with an appetite (for food). Yeb. 15ᵃ תָּאַבְנִי וכ׳ (marg. corr. תאב אני); Tosef. ib. I, 10 תָּאַיבְנִי ed. Zuck. (Var. ת׳ אני) I wish that I had &c. Mekh. Mishp. s. 20 עני ת׳ a poor man in great need, contrad. to דל; a. e.—Pl. תְּאֵבִים, תְּאֵי׳. Y. Taan. I, end, 64ᵈ תְּאֵיבֵי בנים those who long to have children; (Bab. ib. 11ᵃ חסוכי בנים).
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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8373, 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.
