Hebrew word · H5386
נְשִׁי
nishyekhe
debt
'Debt, what is owed on a loan.' This noun appears only here. It belongs to the root נשׁה/נשׁא, 'lend, be a creditor', which gives nosheh, 'creditor' (2 Kgs 4:1; Exod 22:25 [24]; Isa 24:2; Ps 109:11), and mashsha'/masha'ah, 'loan, pledge' (Deut 24:10; Neh 5:7, 10).
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
debt
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
'Debt, what is owed on a loan.' This noun appears only here. It belongs to the root נשׁה/נשׁא, 'lend, be a creditor', which gives nosheh, 'creditor' (2 Kgs 4:1; Exod 22:25 [24]; Isa 24:2; Ps 109:11), and mashsha'/masha'ah, 'loan, pledge' (Deut 24:10; Neh 5:7, 10).
- Against the English
'Debt' is correct, but a modern reader thinks of an impersonal balance owed to an institution. Here the debt is a personal loan that falls on the dead man's household and can be collected by taking his children as slaves (v. 1). YLT's 'loan' keeps the link to lending.
- How it drifted
Modern debt is limited to money and property; personal bondage for debt has been abolished. In ancient Israel a creditor could take members of the debtor's household into bond-service to work the debt off (Exod 21:7; Lev 25:39; Neh 5:5; Amos 2:6).
- Used elsewhere in the period
Ps 109:11 (where the curse is 'let the creditor [nosheh] seize all he has') and Neh 5:1–5 (families selling sons and daughters into servitude to pay creditors) show the same social reality. Israel's law tried to limit it: release in the seventh year (Exod 21:2; Deut 15:12) and a ban on harsh treatment of Israelite debt-servants (Lev 25:39–43).
Where it appears
2 Kings · 1
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2 Kings 4:7 נִשְׁיֵ֑ךְ debt your
She went and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil, and pay your debt. Then you and your sons can live on the remainder.”
Here: 'Your debt.' This noun appears only here in the Hebrew Bible. It comes from the same root as 'the creditor' (hannosheh) in v. 1, so the creditor's claim is answered in the creditor's own vocabulary. The debt is called hers: it passed to her when her husband died.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.