Bible word study

Mishpachah (Strong’s H4940): Meaning in the Bible

Mishpachah (מִשְׁפָּחָה) is the Hebrew word numbered H4940 in Strong’s concordance of the Bible. Strong’s defines it as a family, i.e. circle of relatives; figuratively, a class (of persons), a species (of animals) or sort (of things); by extension a tribe or people. In the King James Bible it is translated family, kind(-red)..

• Original wordמִשְׁפָּחָה
• Transliterationmishpâchâh
• Pronunciationmish-paw-khaw'
• Part of speechnoun (feminine) (n-f)
• Strong’s numberH4940
• LanguageHebrew

The full Strong’s definition

Derivation. from H8192 (compare H8198);

How the King James Bible translates it

Where Mishpachah appears in the Bible

In the King James Bible’s text tagged with Strong’s numbers, Mishpachah (H4940) stands behind 301 English renderings in 224 verses across 21 of the 66 books. It is most frequent in Numbers (159), Joshua (47), 1 Chronicles (19).

How the King James Bible renders Mishpachah, by count

• families169 of 301 (56 percent)
• family120 of 301 (40 percent)
• kindred6 of 301 (2 percent)
• kindreds3 of 301 (1 percent)
• kinds2 of 301 (1 percent)
• every1 of 301 (0 percent)

Three places to read Mishpachah

• Genesis 8:19 Every beast, every creeping thing, and every fowl, and whatsoever creepeth upon the earth, after their kinds, went forth out of the ark.
• Numbers 26:13 Of Zerah, the family of the Zarhites: of Shaul, the family of the Shaulites.
• Joshua 19:40 And the seventh lot came out for the tribe of the children of Dan according to their families.

Counts are made at build time from the King James text tagged with Strong’s numbers (eBible.org, public domain). Verses are read from the stored King James text, never typed.

Why the word matters

Every word the biblical writers chose carries weight. Studying Mishpachah in the original Hebrew lets you read the passages where it appears more carefully, closer to what the first hearers understood, so the meaning is drawn from the text itself rather than from the English alone.

The lexical data on this page comes from the public-domain Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance (James Strong, 1890), a Hebrew and Greek dictionary keyed to the King James Bible. It is a reference tool, not a settled verdict: no single word decides a doctrine, and meaning is finally shaped by how a word is used in its sentences. Read the passages themselves, prayerfully, and in full.

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