Aramaic word · H2528

חֱמָא

chema'

rage

Hot anger, fury, rage. It is related to the Hebrew ḥēmâ ('heat, rage', sometimes 'venom'), from a root meaning 'to be hot'.

A Biblical Aramaic word, from the parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic. Why Aramaic?

Appears 2 times in 2 verses of the Aramaic of the Old Testament. · Updated October 31, 2026

What it means

anger, rage

Aramaic of che.mah (חֵמָה "rage" H2534)

Abridged from Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), via STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0).

Range of meaning: Hot anger, fury, rage. It is related to the Hebrew ḥēmâ ('heat, rage', sometimes 'venom'), from a root meaning 'to be hot'.
Against the English: 'Fury' (KJV, WEB, YLT) and 'rage' (BSB) both work. What English loses is that the word is built on heat.
Used elsewhere in the period: Dan 3:13 has the pair 'in rage and fury' (birgaz waḥămāh). In the Hebrew Bible ḥēmâ is often royal or divine wrath that 'burns' (e.g. Jer 4:4, 'lest my wrath go forth like fire'). Proverbs 16:14 warns that 'a king's wrath (ḥămat-melek) is a messenger of death'.

Range of meaning: Heat, and from that, burning anger or fury. It is related to Hebrew ḥēmâ, from the root yḥm, "to be hot." The Hebrew word can also mean venom or poison (Deut 32:24, 33), the burning of a snake's bite.
Against the English: "Fury" (KJV, WEB, YLT) is close. BSB folds the two nouns into one phrase, "furious with rage," which keeps the strength of the pair but loses the heat image of the second word.
Used elsewhere in the period: In the Aramaic of Daniel it appears again at 3:19: "Nebuchadnezzar was filled with ḥĕmāʾ, and the look of his face changed." The Hebrew ḥēmâ is common for both human and divine wrath (e.g. Gen 27:44; Ezek 5:13). The pair rgz + ḥmh uses two near-synonyms side by side for emphasis, a regular Semitic way of making something stronger.

Daniel · 2

Daniel 3:13 וַחֲמָ֔ה and anger

Then Nebuchadnezzar, furious with rage, summoned Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. So these men were brought before the king,

Here: "And heat," meaning burning fury. The word comes from a root meaning "to be hot." Its heat imagery foreshadows the furnace, and the same word returns in v.19 when the king is "filled with" it and orders the furnace heated seven times hotter.
Daniel 3:19 חֱמָ֗א anger

At this, Nebuchadnezzar was filled with rage, and the expression on his face changed toward Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. He gave orders to heat the furnace seven times hotter than usual,

Here: Burning anger. The root idea is heat, so the king heats up inside before he orders the furnace heated. The same word appears in verse 13 ('in rage and fury').

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