Hebrew word · H7016

קִינָה

vekinah

Kinah

A proper name for a town, found only here. It is spelled exactly like the common noun qînâ (H7015), 'dirge' or 'funeral song'. It also resembles Qayin (Cain) and the Kenite clan name (qênî).

Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·

What it means

§ Kinah = "lamentation"

a town on the extreme southern boundary of Judah next to Edom

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 Joshua 15:22

Range of meaning

A proper name for a town, found only here. It is spelled exactly like the common noun qînâ (H7015), 'dirge' or 'funeral song'. It also resembles Qayin (Cain) and the Kenite clan name (qênî).

Against the English

Every English version simply writes 'Kinah'. Nothing is lost, but a reader would not hear that the name sounds like 'lament' or like the Kenites.

Used elsewhere in the period

A Hebrew ostracon (a potsherd used for writing) from Arad, no. 24, from around 600 BC, orders troops sent 'from Arad … and from Kinah' (qynh). This shows a real fortified place by that name in the Arad–Negev area near the end of the kingdom of Judah. Yohanan Aharoni suggested it was the fortress at Ḥorvat ʿUza, which looks out over a wadi that still has the Arabic name el-Qeini.

Where it appears

Joshua · 1

  1. Joshua 15:22 וְקִינָ֥ה and Kinah

    Kinah, Dimonah, Adadah,

    Here: A town in Judah's far-south Negev district, next on a list that keeps going with 'and'. The name sounds like qînâ, 'lament', and like Qayin, the ancestor of the Kenites, a clan that settled in the Negev near Arad (Judges 1:16). No one knows which, if either, gave the town its name.

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