Hebrew word · H4491

מִנְהָג

keminhag

driving

Driving, the manner of driving or conducting. It is a noun built from נָהַג (drive, lead). In the Hebrew Bible it occurs only in this verse, twice.

Appears 2 times in 1 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

driving, charioteering

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

In depth

From the study of 2 Kings 9:20

Range of meaning

Driving, the manner of driving or conducting. It is a noun built from נָהַג (drive, lead). In the Hebrew Bible it occurs only in this verse, twice.

Against the English

KJV, WEB and YLT keep the abstract 'the driving'. BSB turns it into a person, 'the charioteer is driving', which is smooth English but moves attention from the style to the man.

How it drifted

No English drift. Within Hebrew itself, though, the word later came to mean 'custom' or 'established practice', the way things are habitually done, as in rabbinic and modern Hebrew minhag. That later sense is not present here.

Used elsewhere in the period

In the Bible it appears only here. Its root נָהַג is common for driving livestock (Gen 31:18; Exod 3:1), driving a cart (2 Sam 6:3) and leading people (Isa 11:6; Ps 80:1).

Where it appears

2 Kings · 2

  1. 2 Kings 9:20 וְהַמִּנְהָ֗ג כְּמִנְהַג֙ and the driving, [is] like [the] driving of

    Again the watchman reported, “He reached them, but he is not coming back. And the charioteer is driving like Jehu son of Nimshi—he is driving like a madman!”

    Here: 'And the driving': an abstract noun for the manner of driving. Hebrew has no 'charioteer' here. The watchman spots a style, not yet a face.

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.