עַרְעָר

From the study of Psalm 102:17

Range of meaning

A rare word with a doubled root, probably from ʿ-r-r, 'to strip, lay bare' (see Isa 32:11, 'strip yourselves bare'). As a description of a person it means 'stripped, destitute, utterly bereft'. The same or a closely related form names a desert shrub (Jer 17:6, 'like a shrub in the desert'; compare Jer 48:6). It also appears in the place name Aroer. The idea underneath is bareness: nothing covering you and nothing protecting you.

Against the English

'Destitute' (KJV, BSB, WEB, YLT, NIV and others) is accurate, but today it suggests mainly having no money. The Hebrew picture is wider: stripped of everything, including health, honour, home and companions. 'Stripped bare' or 'utterly forsaken' captures more of it.

How it drifted

English 'destitute' once meant 'abandoned, forsaken' (Latin destitutus, 'left alone'). It has narrowed toward economic poverty, which loses the sense of abandonment that the Hebrew and the older English shared.

Used elsewhere in the period

In the Hebrew Bible it is used of a person only here. In Jer 17:6 the person who trusts in human strength is 'like an ʿarʿār in the desert', a bare and stunted shrub in salt land. The Greek Septuagint (LXX) translates it with tapeinoi, 'the lowly, humbled' (Ps 101:18 in its numbering), and the Latin Vulgate follows with humilium. Both read it as a social and spiritual lowliness, not a strictly economic one.