תַּרְתָּן
Tartan
BDB lists 2 entries for ‘Tartan’ 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.
- Proper
- A name of a specific person, place, or people (e.g. Abraham, Zion, Israel).
State
- Absolute
- The independent form of a noun, not bound to a following word.
Gender
- Masculine
- Grammatically masculine.
Number
- Singular
- One.
Grammatical forms
- Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute 1 time (50%)
- Noun, Proper 1 time (50%)
Parsed forms decoded from the imported morphology (morphhb / Westminster Leningrad Codex — WLC text public domain, morphhb tagging CC BY 4.0), counted across 2 parsed occurrences — not distinct verses.
Every verse where H8661 appears — 2 distinct verses across 2 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.
2 Kings 1 verse
Isaiah 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.
At its core, תרתן (Tartân) means “Tartan.” With only 2 verses it sits in the long tail of Hebrew Bible vocabulary. The word gravitates to 2 Kings (50%), then Isaiah. First canonically at 2 Kings 18:17, it enters the text early. Dig into 2-verse concordance and the renderings breakdown below.
Gloss history
Strong's 1890 vs modern scholarship
About this word
Strong's H8661 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.
- #4,807
- 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 →
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) 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: Tartan 2×
- American Standard Version: Tartan 2×
- Berean Standard Bible: Chief commander 1×, Tartan 1×
- unfoldingWord Literal Text: Tartan 2×
King James Version Public Domain
Renders H8661 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
American Standard Version Public Domain
Renders H8661 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
Berean Standard Bible Public Domain
Renders H8661 across 2 tagged occurrences — most commonly:
unfoldingWord Literal Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Renders H8661 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.
- Tartan - field marshal, general, or commander
- a title used by the Assyrian military
Word origin
n.m. title of Assyrian general = field-marshal (loan-word from Assyrian tartânu, turtânu DlWB 716 TieleGesch. 495 f. PinchesHast. DB Tartan JohnsEncy. Bib. Id.);—Is 20:1 2 K 18:17 (+ רַב־סָרִיס, רַב־שָׁקֵה; only this last in ‖ Is 36:2).
— Brown-Driver-Briggs (Oxford 1906, public domain), digitized via Sefaria, supplemented by the OpenScriptures HebrewLexicon (CC BY 4.0). See Sources.
Origin: of foreign derivation
Forms in the corpus
The 2 distinct written forms H8661 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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| תַרְתָּן֙ | Noun, Proper | Isaiah 20:1 | 1 |
| תַּרְתָּ֥ן | Noun, Common, Masculine, Singular, Absolute | 2 Kings 18:17 | 1 |
Bible dictionary
Public-domain dictionary articles matched to this entry by name (Tartan). A biblical name can be shared by more than one person or place, so an article may treat several.
Easton's Bible Dictionary · M. G. Easton, 1897
An Assyrian word, meaning "the commander-in-chief." (1.) One of Sennacherib's messengers to Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:17). (2.) One of Sargon's generals (Isa. 20:1).
Smith's Bible Dictionary · William Smith, 1863
which occurs only in (2 Kings 18:17) and Isai 20:1 Has been generally regarded as a proper name; like Rabsaris and Rabshakeh, it is more probably an official designation, and indicates the Assyrian commander-in-chief.
Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary · Roswell D. Hitchcock, 1869
a general (official title)
Classic public-domain reference works; full attribution on Sources.
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.
