Aramaic word · H3358
יַקִּיר
yakirah
honorable
The root has to do with weight and worth. In Aramaic the word runs from heavy or weighty to honored or noble (a person of weight). From there it reaches hard, difficult, as a task can be heavy. The Hebrew relative yaqar leans more toward precious, costly, rare.
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. ·
What it means
1) rare, noble, famous, difficult
1a) honourable
1b) difficult (meton)
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
The root has to do with weight and worth. In Aramaic the word runs from heavy or weighty to honored or noble (a person of weight). From there it reaches hard, difficult, as a task can be heavy. The Hebrew relative yaqar leans more toward precious, costly, rare. Hebrew kabed makes the same move between "heavy" and "honored."
- Against the English
BSB, ESV, NIV and NASB all say some form of "difficult." KJV and WEB say "a rare thing." YLT says "precious." NLT goes further with "impossible," which states the speakers' conclusion rather than the word itself.
- How it drifted
"Rare" probably reflects the Hebrew relative, which does mean rare in 1 Samuel 3:1. In 1611 "rare" could also carry the sense of something unusual and remarkable. Today it mostly means "seldom found," which suggests the wrong problem.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Elsewhere in Biblical Aramaic, Ezra 4:10 uses it of a "noble" or honored figure, Osnappar. Hebrew yaqar appears in 1 Samuel 3:1 ("rare") and Proverbs 3:15 ("precious"), and Akkadian has a related word for rare or costly. The ancient translators read "heavy" here: the Greek versions have barys and the Latin Vulgate has gravis. Later Syriac yaqqira also means heavy as well as honored.
Where it appears
Ezra · 1
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Ezra 4:10 וְיַקִּירָ֔א and <the> honorable
and the rest of the peoples whom the great and honorable Ashurbanipal deported and settled in the cities of Samaria and elsewhere west of the Euphrates.
Daniel · 1
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Daniel 2:11 יַקִּירָ֔ה [is] difficult
What the king requests is so difficult that no one can tell it to him except the gods, whose dwelling is not with mortals.”
Here: "Heavy," so hard to bear or do. The word is feminine to agree with "matter." The point is the difficulty of the demand, not its rarity or value.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.