Aramaic word · H787

אֹשׁ

'ushaiya'

foundation

ʾōš: foundation (from Akkadian uššu). Root sbl: bear, carry a load; in the intensive form, maintain, support, uphold.

A Biblical Aramaic word, from the parts of the Old Testament written in Aramaic. Why Aramaic?

Appears 3 times in 3 verses of the Aramaic of the Old Testament. ·

What it means

foundation

Aramaic of a.shu.yah (אָשְׁיָה "foundation" H0803)

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

From the study of Ezra 6:3

Range of meaning

ʾōš: foundation (from Akkadian uššu). Root sbl: bear, carry a load; in the intensive form, maintain, support, uphold.

Against the English

KJV, WEB 'strongly laid'; BSB 'firmly laid'; NIV 'laid'; ESV, NASB 'retained'; NRSV takes the words as 'burnt offerings are brought'. The difference is large: building strength, keeping the old ground plan, or the sacrificial service itself.

How it drifted

English 'firmly/strongly laid' has nothing in the Aramaic for 'firmly'. It goes back to early attempts to make sense of a hard phrase, and it presents a guess as if it were the plain meaning.

Used elsewhere in the period

Hebrew sābal means 'carry a burden' (Isa 46:4, 7: carrying the idols). 1 Esdras 6:24 (Greek) reads 'where they sacrifice with perpetual fire', which suggests its translator read ʾiššôhî, 'its fires / fire-offerings' (compare Hebrew ʾiššeh, the regular word for a food offering made by fire).

Where it appears

Ezra · 3

  1. Ezra 4:12 וְאֻשַּׁיָּ֖א and foundations the

    Let it be known to the king that the Jews who came from you to us have returned to Jerusalem and are rebuilding that rebellious and wicked city. They are restoring its walls and repairing its foundations.

  2. Ezra 5:16 אֻשַּׁיָּ֛א foundations the

    So this Sheshbazzar came and laid the foundation of the house of God in Jerusalem, and from that time until now it has been under construction, but it has not yet been completed.”

  3. Ezra 6:3 וְאֻשּׁ֖וֹהִי and foundations its

    In the first year of King Cyrus, he issued a decree concerning the house of God in Jerusalem: Let the house be rebuilt as a place for offering sacrifices, and let its foundations be firmly laid. It is to be sixty cubits high and sixty cubits wide,

    Here: 'Its foundations', a word borrowed from Akkadian uššu, 'foundation'. Read with slightly different vowels (ʾiššôhî) the same letters could mean 'its fire-offerings', and some scholars think that was the original sense.

Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.