adderet

The standard reference works cluster the twelve occurrences around two poles. BDB arranges the entry in two numbered senses: (1) glory, magnificence, of the vine at Ezekiel 17:8 and of the shepherds at Zechariah 11:3 (with its own note that 11:3 may belong under sense 2, the shepherds being false prophets in the hairy mantle of Zechariah 13:4); (2) mantle, cloak (wide garment) of hair at Genesis 25:25 and Zechariah 13:4, the Elijah and Elisha passages, the Shinar mantle of Joshua 7 (glossed as a Babylonian mantle, doubtless costly), and Jonah 3:6. HALOT keeps one entry with sub-senses (1a glory, splendor, magnificence; 1b mantle, cloak of fur or fine material), treating the two as developments of a single wide/ample/great idea rather than homonyms. Gesenius derived the noun as the feminine of the adjective אַדִּיר, wide, ample, so that the cloak is named for its width and the Ezekiel vine is a wide branching one. Whether DCH splits the word into numbered homonyms (I splendor, II mantle) could not be verified for this entry and should be checked in print at vol. 1. Comparative support for the great/wide root value is West Semitic: Ugaritic ʾadr, great, mighty, used of choicest materials in the Aqhat epic (KTU 1.17 vi 20 to 24), and Phoenician-Punic ʾdr, behind the Carthaginian council of the Adirim. The Akkadian look-alikes adāru/edēru, to be dark, to fear, belong to a different semantic field and are not the source of Hebrew אדר, be great (Cohen). Versional evidence mirrors the lexicographical split, the Septuagint deciding case by case: δορά with δασύς at Genesis 25:25, ψιλὴ ποικίλη at Joshua 7:21 (Aquila στολὴ βαβυλωνική, Symmachus ἔνδυμα, Vulgate pallium coccineum), μηλωτή throughout 3 to 4 Kingdoms, ἄμπελον μεγάλην at Ezekiel 17:8, στολή at Jonah 3:6, μεγαλωσύνη at Zechariah 11:3, and δέρρις τριχίνη at Zechariah 13:4. The choice of μηλωτή is the most consequential: its recurrence at Hebrews 11:37 is read as an echo of the Elijah and Elisha mantle, and the term became the standard word for the monastic sheepskin cloak. On the mantle's function the field runs from the traditional authority and succession reading (Gray; Cogan; Cogan and Tadmor; Sweeney) through Noble's symbolic adoption reading to Fetherolf's argument that the garment marks Elijah's decommissioning rather than his power. For the Shinar garment the relevant material context is the documented Old Assyrian and Babylonian luxury textile trade (Michel and Veenhof; the Kültepe/Kanesh archives), which makes a Babylonian cloak a plausible high value prize; the occasional identification of it as Chinese silk is speculative and should be set aside. Later Hebrew keeps the word in the distinguished garment field: the Targumim and b. Sanhedrin 44a render Achan's cloak as a silk itztela, and Targum Onkelos gives gelim at Genesis 25:25. Qumran and Ben Sira attestations are asserted in some secondary literature but were not confirmed.