Aramaic word · H1759
דּוּשׁ
utedushinah
to tread
To tread, trample, and especially to thresh grain by treading it with animals or dragging a heavy sledge over it. This is the only use in Biblical Aramaic.
A Biblical Aramaic word, from the parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic. Why Aramaic?
Appears once in the Aramaic of the Old Testament. ·
What it means
(P'al) to tread down
Aramaic of dush (דּוּשׁ "to tread" H1758)
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
- Range of meaning
To tread, trample, and especially to thresh grain by treading it with animals or dragging a heavy sledge over it. This is the only use in Biblical Aramaic.
- Against the English
'Tread it down' (KJV, WEB, ESV) and 'trample' (BSB, NIV) give the motion but lose the farm picture of threshing. In 7:7 and 7:19 a different verb, rᵉpas ('stamp'), describes the beast; here the interpreter chooses dûš.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Hebrew dûš: 'do not muzzle the ox while it threshes' (Deut 25:4). The heifer 'that loves to thresh' (Hos 10:11). Damascus 'threshed Gilead with sledges of iron' (Amos 1:3), a stock image for brutal conquest. Zion will 'arise and thresh' the nations with 'horns of iron' (Mic 4:13; cf. Isa 41:15).
Where it appears
Daniel · 1
-
Daniel 7:23 וּתְדוּשִׁנַּ֖הּ and it will tread down it
This is what he said: ‘The fourth beast is a fourth kingdom that will appear on the earth, different from all the other kingdoms, and it will devour the whole earth, trample it down, and crush it.
Here: 'And it will trample it.' In Hebrew the same verb normally means threshing: driving animals or heavy sledges over grain. The world is pictured as a crop flattened and broken on a threshing floor.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.