Word study

Taunt

2 Hebrew words behind this English word

The original-language words that the Berean Standard Bible translates with one of these: taunt, taunted, taunts, taunting. English often uses one word where Hebrew or Greek has several, each with its own shade of meaning. Under each word are verses where it is translated this way; choose the word itself for its full study: every verse, how else it is translated, the forms it takes and what the dictionaries say.

At a glance

How often each original word is translated “taunt” or one of its forms.

Compare the Hebrew words side by side

Hebrew and Aramaic words (Old Testament)

  • חָרַף châraphreproachtranslated this way 17 times of its 41 uses · Strong’s H2778Verb  ·  Translated: taunted 9, defy 7, taunt 4, taunts 3

    Judges 8:15 And Gideon went to the men of Succoth and said, “Here are Zebah and Zalmunna, about whom you taunted me, saying, ‘Are the hands of Zebah and Zalmunna already in your possession, that we should give bread to your weary men?’”

    2 Samuel 21:21 and when he taunted Israel, Jonathan the son of David’s brother Shimei killed him.

    Full study and all 40 verses →
  • כַּעַס kaasbe vexed, angrytranslated this way 2 times of its 53 uses · Strong’s H3707Verb  ·  Translated: provoke me to anger 9, provoked 8, provoking him to anger 6, provoking 6

    1 Samuel 1:6 Because the LORD had closed Hannah’s womb, her rival would provoke her viciously to taunt her.

    1 Samuel 1:7 And this went on year after year. Whenever Hannah went up to the house of the LORD, her rival taunted her until she wept and would not eat.

    Full study and all 52 verses →
How to study a word well
  1. Start from the verse, not the dictionary. Find which Hebrew or Greek word stands in the verse you are studying. One English word often translates several different original words.
  2. Read every place the word is used. A word means what its writers used it to mean. The list of verses and the count by book show its range, and who uses it most.
  3. Look at how it is translated. A word rendered five different ways has a wider meaning than any one English word can carry.
  4. Notice the form. A command is not a statement, and a passive verb is something done to the subject. The form in your verse is part of the meaning.
  5. See what it keeps company with. The words that appear beside it again and again show how the Bible itself connects ideas.
  6. Then read the dictionaries. They give the considered view of scholars, with their evidence.
  7. Come back to the verse. Context decides. A word does not carry every one of its meanings into every verse, and where a word came from does not settle what it means in a sentence written centuries later.

Scripture text and translation counts: Berean Standard Bible. Full entry: Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906, public domain), in the digital edition Brown-Driver-Briggs Enhanced by unfoldingWord (Joel Ruark, J. de Joode), based on data by Eliran Wong and Stephen Ku; its additions are used under CC BY 4.0. Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary: Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project, CC BY 4.0. Hebrew-to-English verse numbering: original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb, CC BY 4.0. We reformatted the data, linked the references to this site’s Bible text and left out words in other scripts that the source holds only as images. These are historical reference works; an entry gives its authors’ view, and a word’s meaning in any verse depends on how it is used there.