תָּאַם
to be double
‘to be double’ is one of 3 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
- Noun
- A naming word — a person, place, thing, or idea.
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
- Adjective
- A word that describes or qualifies a noun.
Noun type
- Common
- A common noun — a general class of person, place, or thing (“king,” “city,” “water”), not a specific name.
Stem
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”). Here: ‘bear twins’
Form
- 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.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H8382 appears in the Book of Song of Solomon — 2 distinct verses. 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.
Song of Solomon
- Song of Solomon 4:2 מַתְאִימ֔וֹת Hiphil ptcp.act fp Your teeth are like a newly shorn flock, Which have come up from the washing, Where every one of them has twins. None is bereaved among them.
- Song of Solomon 6:6 מַתְאִימ֔וֹת Hiphil ptcp.act fp Your teeth are like a flock of ewes, Which have come up from the washing; Of which every one has twins; None is bereaved among them.
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.
At its core, תאם (tâʼam) means “to be double.” With only 4 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to Exodus (50%), then Song of Solomon. First canonically at Exodus 26:24, it enters the text early. Different stems carry different senses — BDB groups them under 2 stems, among them Qal and Hiphil. Dig into 4-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8382 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 →
- 4
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 4 distinct verses.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #3,337
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 3,337 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 4 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Exodus 2 verses 50%
- Song of Solomon 2 verses 50%
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 4 distinct verses.
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 2 verses · 50%
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: They shall be coupled 2×
- American Standard Version: Whereof every one hath twins 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Has its twin 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Bear twins 2×, Pair 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8382 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H8382 across 6 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 4 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 H8382 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8382 across 5 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 1 rendering that appears only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings.
Senses in the full BDB
Hebrew verbs can shift meaning by stem (binyan): Qal is the basic action, Niphal is often passive or reflexive, Piel often intensifies or makes it factitive, and Hiphil is typically causative. The senses below are grouped under the stem BDB assigns to each.
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 2 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.
Qal
- Pt. pl. תֹּאֲמִם Ex 26:24 ‖ תּוֹאֲמִים 36:29; so read also (for תַּמִּים) 26:24; 36:29 (both P), cf. Sam. Di Baen ARSKHast. DB iv.661. e.g. Exodus 26:24
Hiphil
- bear twins: Pt. f. pl. מַתְאִימוֹת Ct 5:2; 6:6. e.g. Song of Solomon 4:2
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
vb. denom. be double;—
— 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.
תָּאַם
- v. אַם) to join, combine.—Denom. תְּאוֹם.
- (denom. of תְּאוֹם) to be twin-like, joined, adjoining. Y. Ber. III, 6ᵇ top היו שם שתי דרכים מַתְאִימוֹת וכ׳ if there are two twin-roads (starting from, and leading to the same place), one long, but levitically clean, and the other short, but unclean; Y. Naz. VII, 56ᵃ bot. Tosef. Sabb. III, 3 שתי כירים המתאימות two adjoining stoves (perfectly alike); Sabb. 37ᵃ; Y. ib. III, beg. 5ᶜ; a. e.—Bekh. VI, 1 מתאימות (sub. שינים) molar teeth, v. תְּאוֹם.—Kel. II, 7 Ar., v. infra.—Part. pass. מוּתְאָם; f. מוּתְאֶמֶת; pl. מוּתְאָמִים; מוּתְאָמוֹת a) placed between. Cant. R. to I, 13 שהוא מ׳ בין וכ׳ he (Abraham) was between the Divine Presence and the angel. Ib. to IV, 2; Yalk. ib. 988 שהיו מ׳ וכ׳ they (the Israelites) were between &c. Cant. R. to IV, 4 שהיו מ׳ בין החלוץ וכ׳ they were placed between the vanguard and the rear-guard.—b) divided into two compartments. Sifré Deut. 357 as the branch is separated from the trunk, yet not detached (v. פִּסְגָּה), כך קבורתו … מ׳ מן ההר ואינה מ׳ so is Moses’ grave divided off from the mountain and yet not entirely divided off, the valley being between them (to connect them); Yalk. ib. 963.—Kel. II, 7 קלמרים המותאמות ed. Dehr. (oth. ed. המְתוֹאָמוֹת, Pu.; Ar. המַתְאֶמֶת) an inkstand with two compartments, v. קַלְמָרִין.
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 4 distinct written forms H8382 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| מַתְאִימ֔וֹת | Verb, Hiphil, Participle Active, Feminine, Plural, Absolute | Song of Solomon 4:2 | 2 |
| תַמִּים֙ | Adjective, Adjective, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 36:29 | 1 |
| תֹֽאֲמִים֮ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 26:24 | 1 |
| תוֹאֲמִם֮ | Noun, Common, Masculine, Plural, Absolute | Exodus 36:29 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8382, 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 4 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.
