father: the man of the generation just before you, and in the plural the forebears your family or people came from
This is the Aramaic word for father, and it appears only in the Aramaic parts of Daniel and Ezra, nine times in all. It is the twin of the Hebrew word (אָב), and it names the same bond that the word for son (בַּר) names from the other side. But the few verses that use it show only a narrow slice of the wider Hebrew range: no founder of a craft or a town, no honored title for a prophet or an official, and no address to God as father.
Every singular use falls in one chapter. Four times in Daniel 5 Nebuchadnezzar is called the father of the king now on the throne, once by the queen, once by Belshazzar himself, and once by Daniel. The relationship in view is a royal one, the man whose place the present king has taken, and the word carries it without insisting that the two were parent and child by birth.
In the plural the word reaches back across generations rather than one. It names the forebears whose actions still shape the present: the ancestors who angered the God of heaven and so lost the temple and the city, and the earlier kings whose written records a later king is told to search. English normally changes words here, from "fathers" to "ancestors" or "forefathers", though the Aramaic has only the one word for both.
One use stands slightly apart. When Daniel thanks the God of his ancestors, he is using a settled way of naming God that reaches past his own family to the whole line of Israel before him. It is the Aramaic form of a phrase already worn smooth in Hebrew, and Daniel reaches for it at the moment he is given the answer no one else in Babylon could produce.