Aramaic word · H2192

זְעֵיר

ze'eirah

little

Small or little in size or amount. The Hebrew cognate appears in Isaiah 28:10, 13 ('a little here, a little there').

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

a little, small

Aramaic of ze.er (זְעֵיר "little" H2191)

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 Daniel 7:8

Range of meaning

Small or little in size or amount. The Hebrew cognate appears in Isaiah 28:10, 13 ('a little here, a little there').

Against the English

'Little horn' (KJV and all versions) is accurate. It can wrongly suggest something minor or harmless, but the point is a small start and an outsized result.

Used elsewhere in the period

This is the only use of the word in biblical Aramaic. The parallel Hebrew vision in 8:9 describes a horn that came out 'from smallness' and then 'grew exceedingly great'. In 7:20 the same horn looks 'greater than its companions'.

Where it appears

Daniel · 1

  1. Daniel 7:8 זְעֵירָה֙ small

    While I was contemplating the horns, suddenly another horn, a little one, came up among them, and three of the first horns were uprooted before it. This horn had eyes like those of a man and a mouth that spoke words of arrogance.

    Here: 'Small.' This describes how the horn starts out, not how much it matters. By 7:20 it looks 'greater than its companions'. It is a ruler who starts small and pushes his way to dominance.

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