תַּנָּה
jackals
also: habitations, dragon, sea monster 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
- 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.
- Construct
- A noun bound to a following noun in a possessive / “of” relationship (the construct chain).
Gender
- Both
- Attested as both masculine and feminine.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
Every verse where H8568 appears in the Book of Malachi — 1 distinct verse. 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.
Malachi
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, תנה (tannâh) means “jackals.” It occurs a mere 2 verses across Scripture. Its uses cluster heavily in Lamentations (50% of all occurrences). Scripture first uses it in Lamentations 4:3. Ranging over 2 senses, its meaning includes “habitations”, “dragon”, and “sea monster”. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8568 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.
- 2 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 2 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #4,179
- by frequency
- Top 5000 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 4,179 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 2 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Lamentations 1 verse 50%
- Malachi 1 verse 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 2 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 1 verse · 50%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 1 verse · 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: Dragons 1×
- American Standard Version: Jackals 1×
- Berean Standard Bible: Jackals 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Jackals 1×, Jackals of 1×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8568 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8568 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8568 across 1 tagged occurrence — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8568 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Senses in BDB
The 2 senses 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.
- habitations, jackals, (TWOT) dragon, (TWOT) sea monster
- meaning uncertain
Word origin
n.[m. et.] f. La 4:3 jackal (so most; TrNHB 109 ff., 263 f. Shipley-CookEncy. Bib. Jackal; but wolf PostHast.DB; Dragon, cf. Che Is 13:22 and (rare) Arabic تِينَانٌ );—pl. תַּנִּים Mi 1:8 +, תַּנִּין La 4:3 (Ges§ 87 e), לְתַנּוֹת Mal 1:3 (si vera l.; 𝔊 Thes al. interpret = dwellings, Sta Now conjecturre נְאוֹת, Marti נָתַתִּי לְ);—jackal, howling mournfully in waste places, Mi 1:8; Jb 30:29 (both ‖ בְּנוֹת יַעֲנָה), Is 13:22 (‖ אִיִּים), in desert also 43:20 (‖ בְּנוֹת יַעֲנָה); deserted sites called מְעוֹן ת׳ Je 9:10; 10:22; 49:33; 51:37, נְוֵה ת׳ Is 34:13; 35:7, מְקוֹם ת׳ ψ 44:20, ת׳ מִדְבָּר Mal 1:3 (si vera l., but v. supra); ת׳ as snuffing up wind Je 14:6, giving suck La 4:3.
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from תן (tan) (H8565) — dragon.
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.
תָּנָה
- , v. תני
תני
- v. שָׁנָה) [to repeat,] to tell.
- same. Gen. R. s. 6 (ref. to Ps. L, 6) לעתיד … שמים מְתַנִּים וכ׳ in the future the heavens shall tell the righteousness which the Lord does to his world. Yalk. Jer. 277 והיה מְתַנֶּה נסים וכ׳ and he told the wonders that happened to him &c.; (Ber. 13ᵃ מספר). Midr. Till. to Ps. CXVIII, 14 לא לי לתַנּוֹת כל וכ׳ is it not my duty to tell all the wonders &c.?; a. e. e.g. Psalms 50:6
- to stipulate, agree, make a condition. B. Bath. 8ᵇ רשאין … להַתְנוֹת על וכ׳ the residents of a town have a right to stipulate measures, prices of food, and wages of laborers. Keth. IX, 1 שה׳ על מה שכתוב וכ׳ because he made an agreement contrary to what is written in the Law; וכל המַתְנֶה על וכ׳, v. תְּנַאי. Erub. III, 5 מתנה אדם על ערובו וכ׳ a man may lay his ‘Erub (v. עֵירוּב) on condition and say, if gentiles come &c. Ib. 36ᵇ אין אדם מתנה על … כאחד no man can lay down conditions for two alternatives together (so as to reserve to himself the choice in the event of both alternatives coming to pass); a. fr.—Part. pass. מוּתְנֶה; pl. מוּתְנִים; מוּתְנִין. Y. Keth. X, end, 34ᵃ; Y. B. Kam. IV, 4ᵇ top שוורים כמ׳ הן in the case of oxen (of several owners, consecutively gored by the same ox) it is as if an agreement had been made beforehand.
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 3 distinct written forms H8568 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| לְ/תַנּ֥וֹת | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Construct | Malachi 1:3 | 1 |
| תַּנִּים֙ | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute | Lamentations 4:3 | 1 |
| תנין | Noun, Common, Both, Plural, Absolute | Lamentations 4:3 | 1 |
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H8568, 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
Shares the same root
Compare all same-root words → They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 2 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 2 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.
