Aramaic word · H5085
נִדְנֵ֑ה
nidneh
sheath
A sheath or scabbard. It is probably borrowed from a Persian word meaning 'receptacle, container'. The Hebrew form nadan appears at 1 Chr 21:27, where the angel 'put his sword back into its sheath'.
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
1) sheath
1a) meaning uncertain
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
A sheath or scabbard. It is probably borrowed from a Persian word meaning 'receptacle, container'. The Hebrew form nadan appears at 1 Chr 21:27, where the angel 'put his sword back into its sheath'.
- Against the English
KJV has '[my] body', WEB 'my body', ESV 'within me' and NASB 'within me'. BSB leaves the phrase out of its English. Only YLT keeps 'the sheath'. Each of these choices hides the metaphor of the body as a scabbard and the spirit as the blade inside it.
- Used elsewhere in the period
The strongest parallel is the Aramaic Genesis Apocryphon from Qumran (1QapGen 2:10). Lamech, alarmed by his son's unusual birth, says his breath/soul is 'within its sheath'. This shows the phrase was a living Aramaic idiom for the life-breath housed in the body. Later rabbinic interpretation also uses 'sheath' for the body as the container of the spirit (e.g. on Gen 6:3 in b. Sanhedrin 108a).
Where it appears
Daniel · 1
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Daniel 7:15 נִדְנֶ֑ה [the] sheath
I, Daniel, was grieved in my spirit, and the visions in my mind alarmed me.
Here: The word means a sword's sheath and is very likely borrowed from Persian. Here it pictures the body as the case that holds the spirit, the way a scabbard holds a blade. The image is vivid, and most English versions flatten it to 'within me' or 'body'.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.