אָתָה
to come
‘to come’ 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
- Verb
- An action or state-of-being word.
Stem
- Qal
- The basic, simple active stem — the plain form of the verb (“he wrote”).
- Hiphil
- The causative active stem (“he caused / brought about”). Here: ‘bring’
Form
- Imperfect
- An incomplete, ongoing, or future action (“he will / would write”).
- Imperative
- A direct command (“write!”).
- Sequential Imperfect
- An imperfect with prefixed waw — the standard past-narrative form (waw-consecutive imperfect).
- Participle Active
- A verbal adjective expressing ongoing or characteristic action (“writing / one who writes”).
- Sequential Perfect
- A perfect with prefixed waw continuing a preceding imperfect or command (waw-consecutive perfect).
- 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”).
- 2nd Person
- The one addressed (“you”).
- 1st Person
- The speaker (“I / we”).
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
- Feminine
- Grammatically feminine.
- Common
- Either gender — not distinguished for this form.
Number
- Plural
- More than one (in Hebrew, generally three or more).
- Singular
- One.
Every verse where H857 appears in the Book of Proverbs — 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.
Proverbs
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.
אתה (ʼâthâh) is a Hebrew verb most often rendered “to come.” Debuting at Deuteronomy 33:2, it then recurs through the corpus. The Hebrew Bible uses it across 20 verses — uncommon. Isaiah dominates its distribution — 9 of 20 verses. The verb spans 2 stems, from Qal to Hiphil. The sections below give every sense, occurrence, and version rendering.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H857 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 →
- 20
- distinct verses
- The word appears in 20 distinct verses.
- 7 / 39
- OT books
- The word appears in 7 of 39 Old Testament books.
- #1,462
- by frequency
- Top 2500 most frequent Hebrew words (rank 1,462 of 8,640 Hebrew words by occurrence).
View all 20 occurrences in the concordance →
Most concentrated in
- Isaiah 9 verses 45%
- Job 4 verses 20%
- Deuteronomy 2 verses 10%
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 20 distinct verses.
- Prophets (Nevi'im) 12 verses · 60%
- Writings (Ketuvim) 6 verses · 30%
- Torah (Pentateuch) 2 verses · 10%
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: Come 4×, Cometh 3×, He came 2×
- American Standard Version: Cometh 4×, Come 3×, He came 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Come 2×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Come 4×, Comes 2×, Will come 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H857 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 12 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 H857 across 21 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 10 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 H857 across 20 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 18 renderings that appear only once — usually multi-word phrases or single function words the recovered tagging swept in, not distinct renderings. Not rendered by a distinct English word in 1 further occurrence.
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H857 across 22 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Plus 14 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
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
- Pf. א׳ Dt 33:2; אָתָא Is 21:12 v. Ges§ 75 R. 22; 1 pl. אָתָנוּ Je 3:22; Impf. יֶאֱתֶה Jb 37:22 Pr 1:27; וַיֵּתֵא Dt 33:21 (= וַיֶּאֱתֶה cf. Di Köi. 577), וַיַּאת Is 41:25; sf. וַיֶּאֱתָיֵנִי Jb 3:25; 3 fs. תֵּאתֶה Mi 4:8; 3 mpl. יֶאֱתָ֫יוּ Jb 16:22 + 2 times; וַיֶּאֱתָיוּ֑ן Is 41:5; Imv. mpl. אֵתָ֫יוּ Is 21:12 + 2 times; Pt. fpl. אֹתִיּוֹת Is 41:23 + 2 times;—come, of men Dt 33:21 ψ 68:32 Is 41:25; 56:12 Imv. = come now, with hostile purpose Jb 30:14, of men unto י׳ Je 3:22 (sq. לְ) cf. Is 21:12; of י׳ Dt 33:2; of ends of earth, etc., personif. Is 41:5; of time, morning Is 21:12, years Jb 16:22; of weather Jb 37:22; of beasts, to devour Is 56:9 (sq. inf.), of calamity Pr 1:27 Jb 3:25 come upon, c. sf., of dominion Mi 4:8 (sq. עַד). Pt. pl. fem. as subst. things to come, future things Is 41:23; 44:7; 45:11. e.g. Deuteronomy 33:2
Hiphil
- bring, Imv. הֵתָ֫יוּ מַיִם Is 21:14 bring water (on form, for הֶאֱתוּ cf. Di Ew§ 141 a Ges§ 68, 2 R. 1, § 76. 2 (c1)); Je 12:9 bring beasts, to devour. e.g. Isaiah 21:14
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. come (in Heb. only poet.) (Arabic أَتَى, Sab. אתו DHMZMG 1875, 597; 1883, 343, Aramaic אֲתָא, ܐܶܬܳܐ )—
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Derived from אות (ʼûwth) (H225) — to agree.
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.
אַתָּה
- ,, v. אָנֹכִי) thou. Ber. 11ᵃ; a. fr.—אתה אומר, v. אַתְּ.—Pl. אַתֶּם, אַתֶּן ye. Ber. I, 1; a. fr.—R. Hash. 25ᵃ א׳ א׳ א׳ ג׳ פעמים וכ׳ three times attem is written (אֹתָם, without ו); v. אֲפִילּוּ. Sifra Emor IX, 9; a. fr.
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 19 distinct written forms H857 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.
Same root — word family
Other BDB entries built from the same root as H857, 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
Derived from this word
Compare all same-root words → Showing 4 of 5 — not the complete family. They share a root, not necessarily a meaning.
Septuagint verse parallels
This word appears in 19 verses that also exist in the Greek Old Testament (Septuagint), out of the 20 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.
