StrongerBible

even

אֶבֶן

AramaicH0069stone, rock

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Ezr 5:8Ezr 6:4Dan 2:34Dan 2:35Dan 2:45Dan 5:4Dan 5:23Dan 6:17(18)
Word studyEH-vennoun

What even means

a stone: a piece of rock that has been cut loose and set in place, whether in a wall, over an opening, or carved into an image

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This is the plain Aramaic word for stone, and every one of its eight uses is concrete. It covers dressed blocks in the wall of the rebuilt temple, the slab shut over the mouth of the lions' den, the raw material of manufactured gods, and the stone of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. It is the same word as the Hebrew (אֶבֶן), which Ezra and Daniel simply carry over into Aramaic.

What holds the uses together is that this is stone once it has been separated from the ground and put somewhere. The Aramaic word for a mountain (טוּר) names the mass that stays where it is; this word names what comes out of it. Daniel 2 turns on exactly that difference: the stone is cut from the mountain, strikes the statue, and then swells into a mountain itself, so the small quarried thing ends up filling the whole earth.

The idol scenes work the same way. When Belshazzar and his court praise gods of gold, silver, bronze, iron, wood, and stone, naming the material is the whole argument: a god made of the same stuff as a wall cannot see or hear or save. In Ezra the sense is as ordinary as it gets, heavy building stone paired with timber in a construction report sent to the Persian king.

Nuances

1alarge blocks of stone quarried, moved, and laid in courses to build with
Ezr 5:8Ezr 6:4
1ba single stone laid over an opening to close it and hold it shut
Dan 6:17(18)
1cstone as one of the raw materials a god-image is made from, listed beside wood and metal
Dan 5:4Dan 5:23
1dthe stone of Nebuchadnezzar's dream, cut loose by no human hand, which shatters the statue of the kingdoms and grows into a mountain
Dan 2:34Dan 2:35Dan 2:45

What scholars say about even

The Biblical Aramaic אֶבֶן is the same lexeme as Hebrew אֶבֶן, and the lexica treat it accordingly: HALOT's Aramaic section, BDB's Aramaic supplement, and DCH all gloss it simply "stone" and subdivide the eight attestations by context (building stone in Ezra 5:8; 6:4; the covering of the den in Dan 6:18 MT [English 6:17]; the material of the gods in Dan 5:4, 23; the stone of the dream in Dan 2:34, 35, 45). The noun is a primitive Proto-Semitic form (*ʾab(V)n-), attested independently as Akkadian abnu, Ugaritic ʾabn, Syriac/Aramaic ʾabnā, and in Arabic and Ethiopic; the older derivation from בנה "to build" is not maintained by comparative Semitists. The corpus attests the absolute (אֶבֶן), the determined (אַבְנָא), and the construct in the Ezra collocation אֶבֶן גְּלָל, on which commentators (Williamson, WBC; Blenkinsopp, OTL) divide between "stone of rolling," i.e. blocks so massive they were moved by rolling, and dressed ashlar of the sort attested in Achaemenid-period masonry, the phrase in either case corresponding to the Persian-chancellery description of monumental construction. For Dan 2:34-35, 45 the critical commentaries (Collins, Hermeneia; Goldingay, WBC) read the אֶבֶן דִּי לָא בִידַיִן as the divinely established kingdom of the four-kingdoms schema, with the stone-to-mountain transformation deliberately reversing the quarrying image; the disagreement there concerns the referent of the symbol within the apocalypse, not the lexical sense of the noun. TDOT's article on the Hebrew term covers the Aramaic material alongside it.

Sources

  • HALOT, s.v. אֶבֶן (Biblical Aramaic section)lexicon
  • BDB, Biblical Aramaic section, s.v. אֶבֶןlexicon
  • DCH, s.v. אבןlexicon
  • TDOT, s.v. אֶבֶןtheological-dictionary
  • John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993)commentary
  • John E. Goldingay, Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary 30; Dallas: Word, 1989)commentary
  • H. G. M. Williamson, Ezra, Nehemiah (Word Biblical Commentary 16; Waco: Word, 1985)commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Ezra-Nehemiah: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1988)commentary

All attested forms of אֶבֶן

c s absolute

אֶבֶן

Dan 2:34, Dan 2:45, Dan 6:17

c s determined

אַבְנָא

Dan 2:35, Dan 5:4, Dan 5:23

c s construct

אֶבֶן

Ezr 5:8, Ezr 6:4