Aramaic word · H2816
חֲשׁוֹךְ
vachashokha'
darkness
Darkness. The Aramaic equivalent of Hebrew ḥošek: literal darkness or night, and by extension the unknown, the unseen, gloom or calamity. Context decides whether a moral sense is present.
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
darkness
Aramaic of mach.shakh (מַחְשָׁךְ "darkness" H4285)
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
Darkness. The Aramaic equivalent of Hebrew ḥošek: literal darkness or night, and by extension the unknown, the unseen, gloom or calamity. Context decides whether a moral sense is present.
- Against the English
'Darkness' is the right word. The risk is that modern readers bring in a mainly moral meaning ('our dark sins') that this context does not support.
- How it drifted
Christian devotional language, drawing on John and Paul's light/darkness imagery for sin and evil, has made 'darkness' a moral word first. In Daniel 2 it is a word about knowledge.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Job 12:22; Ps 139:11–12 ('darkness is not dark to you'); Isa 45:3 ('treasures of darkness, hidden riches'); Isa 45:7 (God forms light and creates darkness), from the same Persian-era horizon.
Where it appears
Daniel · 1
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Daniel 2:22 בַחֲשׁוֹכָ֔א [is] in darkness the
He reveals the deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him.
Here: 'In the darkness': the realm of what cannot be seen or known. In this story that means the content of a dream given at night, which the king could not or would not tell.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.