כַּנָּה
kan.nah
shoot
Lexicon Entry
Lexicon data from STEPBible TIPNR, Tyndale House, Cambridge. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
What Original Readers Understood
Supported# Analysis of Hebrew כַּנָּה (kannah) The Hebrew word כַּנָּה (kannah) denotes a "shoot"—a young, emerging growth from a plant or tree. Based on the lexical data, this term refers to the botanical feature of new vegetation sprouting from an established plant. The word appears only once in the biblical text, which limits our ability to observe variation in its usage or to identify multiple semantic contexts. The single occurrence of this word in Scripture suggests it held a specialized rather than common role in biblical Hebrew vocabulary. Its singular appearance makes it difficult to establish a broad semantic range or to understand how different biblical writers employed the term. The meaning itself is botanically straightforward: a shoot represents the earliest visible stage of new plant growth, a concept relevant to agricultural and horticultural contexts that would have been familiar to ancient Israelite audiences. Given its rarity in the biblical record, kannah appears to have functioned as a technical or descriptive term rather than a frequently used everyday word. Its presence in Scripture indicates that biblical authors possessed specific vocabulary for botanical phenomena, though the limited textual evidence prevents us from determining the precise theological, metaphorical, or literal contexts in which this particular term was applied.
Source data & methodology
Occurrences in Scripture
1 total occurrence across the text