שֵׁגָל

From the study of Psalm 45:9

Range of meaning

A royal consort: the wife who sits or stands beside a king. It is a court title, not a general word for 'woman' or 'wife.'

Against the English

Most English versions say 'queen' (KJV, BSB, WEB, ESV, NASB). NIV says 'royal bride.' 'Queen' is acceptable, but today it can suggest a woman who rules in her own right. The Hebrew word means a king's wife, defined by her place next to him.

How it drifted

Modern English 'queen' covers both a ruling monarch (a queen regnant) and a king's wife (a queen consort). Readers who know modern monarchies often hear the first. Shegal means only the second.

Used elsewhere in the period

Elsewhere in the Bible it occurs only in Persian-period settings: Nehemiah 2:6 (the queen sitting beside Artaxerxes) and, in Aramaic, Daniel 5:2, 3, 23, where Belshazzar's šēgĕlātēh ('his consorts') are listed with his concubines. HALOT and others suggest it was borrowed from Akkadian ša ekalli, 'she of the palace,' but that origin is debated. Some link it to the Hebrew verb šāgal ('to lie with'), which the scribes found so coarse that they replaced it with a milder word when reading aloud (Deut 28:30; Isa 13:16). If that link holds, the word first stressed the sexual and marital bond, and only later became a title.