Hebrew word · H8231
שָׁפַר
shaferah
to polish
To be beautiful, fair, pleasing. As a Hebrew verb it occurs only here. Related Hebrew words are šeper, "beauty/beautiful" (Gen 49:21), šiprâ, "fairness, clearness" (Job 26:13), and probably šaprîr, "canopy" (Jer 43:10).
Appears once in the Hebrew Old Testament. ·
What it means
1) to be pleasing, be beautiful, be fair, be comely, be bright, glisten
1a) (Qal) to be beautiful
Aramaic equivalent: she.phar (שְׁפַר "to acceptable" H8232)
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
To be beautiful, fair, pleasing. As a Hebrew verb it occurs only here. Related Hebrew words are šeper, "beauty/beautiful" (Gen 49:21), šiprâ, "fairness, clearness" (Job 26:13), and probably šaprîr, "canopy" (Jer 43:10). It is common in Aramaic: "it seemed good to me" (Dan 3:32 [4:2 Eng]), "let my counsel be pleasing to you" (Dan 4:24 [4:27 Eng]), "it pleased Darius" (Dan 6:2 [6:1 Eng]), and the adjective šappîr, "beautiful" (Dan 4:9).
- Against the English
BSB "delightful," ESV "beautiful," KJV "goodly," WEB "good." "Good" is too flat. KJV's "goodly" meant "fine, handsome" in 1611 but now sounds like "sizeable" ("a goodly sum"). The Hebrew is about beauty and pleasure, not size.
- How it drifted
The English adjective "goodly" has shifted from "comely, fine" to "considerable in amount."
- Used elsewhere in the period
Strong's glosses the root "to glisten," and the supplied lemma has "to polish." Those are guesses about the word's origin. Actual usage in Hebrew and Aramaic is consistently "be beautiful / be pleasing" (BDB, HALOT).
Similar words
Where it appears
Psalms · 1
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Psalm 16:6 שָֽׁפְרָ֥ה it is beautiful
The lines of my boundary have fallen in pleasant places; surely my inheritance is delightful.
Here: "It is fair, lovely, attractive." This is the owner looking over his field and liking what he sees. The verb is rare in Biblical Hebrew but common in Aramaic in the sense "to be pleasing."
Word data: STEPBible.org (CC BY 4.0), main text only.