StrongerBible

ḥen

חֵן

HebrewH2581Proper Noun“Hen”

Appears 1 time · tap a cell to see the verses

Zec 6:14
Word studyResearch-gradekhenproper noun

What ḥen means

Hen: the name of a man in the book of Zechariah, a son of Zephaniah, kept in memory by the crown stored in the temple.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyContested

Hen appears exactly once in the Bible. Zechariah is told to take silver and gold from three men who have just come back from exile in Babylon, make a crown from it, and set it on the head of the high priest. The crown is then to stay in the temple as a reminder of the men who gave the metal, and Hen son of Zephaniah is the last of the four names on that memorial list.

The name is written exactly like the everyday Hebrew word for favor (חֵן), and it belongs to a large family of Hebrew names built on the verb "to be gracious": Hannah, Hanan, Hananiah, Elhanan, Johanan. Parents across the whole region named children this way to say that God had been kind to them. The Carthaginian general Hannibal carried the same kind of name in a related language, where it meant "Baal has been gracious."

The puzzle is that four verses earlier the same short list of donors reads differently: Heldai, Tobijah, Jedaiah, and Josiah son of Zephaniah. By the closing line the first name has become Helem and the last has become Hen. Readers have taken this three ways:

  • a second name for the Josiah son of Zephaniah named earlier in the passage;
  • a warm nickname, something like "the gracious one," earned by the kindness he showed;
  • not a name at all, but the plain word for favor, so that the crown recalls the kindness shown by Zephaniah's son.

Nothing else in the Bible is said about him. English Bibles are divided, some printing "Hen" and others printing "Josiah," and the Hebrew gives no further help.

Zec 6:14

What scholars say about ḥen

BDB (336) lists חֵן in Zech 6:14 as a masculine proper name while noting the widely proposed reading יֹאשִׁיָּה carried over from v. 10; HALOT registers the same difficulty at its entry for the form. The two donor lists of Zech 6:10 and 6:14 diverge at their first and last members (חֶלְדַּי alongside חֵלֶם, יֹאשִׁיָּה alongside חֵן), and the textual history of the crowning oracle is treated at length in the Anchor Bible and NICOT commentaries on Zechariah. Onomastically the form sits in the well attested Northwest Semitic hnn name family (חַנָּה, חָנָן, חֲנַנְיָה, אֶלְחָנָן, יוֹחָנָן, and Phoenician-Punic hnbʿl), catalogued by Noth as the principal West Semitic root for divinely bestowed favor in personal naming. On the underlying noun see Stoebe, TLOT 1:439-47.

Where scholars disagree about ḥen

Whether חֵן in Zech 6:14 is a personal name at all, or the ordinary noun "favor" used of the Josiah son of Zephaniah named in Zech 6:10.

  • contestedA masculine personal name, built on the same root as חָנָן and חֲנַנְיָה, most naturally a second name for the Josiah son of Zephaniah of v. 10; the standard lexicons give it its own entry as a proper name.; Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 336
  • contestedNot a name: either the text is to be read with יֹאשִׁיָּה from v. 10, or חֵן is the common noun, so that the memorial honors the favor shown by the son of Zephaniah.; Koehler, Baumgartner, and Stamm, HALOT (Brill, 1994-2000), s.v. chen
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1906), 336lexicon
  • Koehler, Baumgartner, and Stamm, HALOT (Brill, 1994-2000), s.v. chenlexicon
  • Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen (Kohlhammer, 1928), 187-88monograph
  • Meyers and Meyers, Haggai, Zechariah 1-8, Anchor Bible 25B (Doubleday, 1987)commentary
  • Boda, The Book of Zechariah, NICOT (Eerdmans, 2016)commentary
  • Stoebe, TLOT (Hendrickson, 1997), 1:439-47dictionary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of חֵן

m

חֵן

Zec 6:14