Hebrew word · H3955
לָשָׁד
leshad
juicy bit
Juice, sap, rich moisture, a rich or fatty substance. Applied to a person, it means freshness, vigour, the vital fluid of life. It occurs only twice in the Bible.
Appears 2 times in 2 verses of the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
juice, juicy bit, dainty bit
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
Juice, sap, rich moisture, a rich or fatty substance. Applied to a person, it means freshness, vigour, the vital fluid of life. It occurs only twice in the Bible.
- Against the English
BSB/ESV/NIV/WEB render it 'strength' (NASB 'vitality'), which is right but abstract and loses the image of liquid. KJV/YLT 'moisture' keeps the liquid but can sound clinical to modern ears. 'Sap' or 'the juice of life' is closest to the picture.
- How it drifted
Translators turn the picture into an abstraction because the word is rare and 'my sap' sounds odd in English.
- Used elsewhere in the period
Numbers 11:8: the manna tasted 'like leshad of oil', meaning something like a rich oil cake or the cream of oil, which shows the word's sense of richness and moisture. Lexicons (BDB, HALOT) give 'juice, sap, vigour'.
Where it appears
Numbers · 1
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Numbers 11:8 לְשַׁ֥ד <the> cake of
The people walked around and gathered it, ground it on a handmill or crushed it in a mortar, then boiled it in a cooking pot or shaped it into cakes. It tasted like pastry baked with fine oil.
Psalms · 1
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Psalm 32:4 לְשַׁדִּ֑י juice my
For day and night Your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was drained as in the summer heat. Selah
Here: 'My sap', 'my freshness': a rare word for the rich moisture that makes something alive and full. Used of a person, it means his vigour and vitality.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.