Aramaic word · H5403
נְשַׁר
neshar
eagle
A large bird of prey. The Hebrew counterpart nešer covers both the eagle and the griffon vulture; Micah 1:16 speaks of the nešer's baldness, which fits the vulture. Its associations are speed, height, a sudden swoop on prey, and kingship over the birds.
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
eagle, vulture, griffon-vulture
Aramaic of ne.sher (נֶשֶׁר "eagle" H5404)
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 large bird of prey. The Hebrew counterpart nešer covers both the eagle and the griffon vulture; Micah 1:16 speaks of the nešer's baldness, which fits the vulture. Its associations are speed, height, a sudden swoop on prey, and kingship over the birds.
- Against the English
"Eagle" is a fair rendering. Some scholars note that the ancient bird may be the griffon vulture, but the point of the image (swift, high-flying predator) is the same either way.
- Used elsewhere in the period
The prophets use the eagle for Babylon's speed in conquest: the Chaldeans "fly like an eagle swift to devour" (Hab 1:8). Their pursuers are "swifter than the eagles of the heavens" (Lam 4:19). Ezekiel 17:3–12 makes "a great eagle with great wings" an explicit figure for the king of Babylon. In Daniel 4:33 (Aramaic 4:30), when Nebuchadnezzar is driven out among animals, "his hair grew like eagles' (feathers)": the same Aramaic word.
Where it appears
Daniel · 2
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Daniel 4:33 כְּנִשְׁרִ֥ין like eagles
At that moment the sentence against Nebuchadnezzar was fulfilled. He was driven away from mankind. He ate grass like an ox, and his body was drenched with the dew of heaven, until his hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird.
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Daniel 7:4 נְשַׁ֖ר an eagle
The first beast was like a lion, and it had the wings of an eagle. I watched until its wings were torn off and it was lifted up from the ground and made to stand on two feet like a man and given the mind of a man.
Here: The large bird of prey, king of the birds. The lion is the best of the land animals and the eagle the best of the birds, so the creature joins the two in one monstrous emblem of royal power.
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.