there is, there are: the plain statement that someone or something exists, is present, or is at hand.
Biblical Aramaic has no present-tense verb for "to be." When the Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel need to say that something exists, is present, or is available, they reach for this one small word. It is the Aramaic twin of the Hebrew word for "there is" (יֵשׁ), and it works the same way: a bare claim about what is there, carrying no tense of its own. Whether an English Bible prints "there is," "there was," or "there will be" is decided by the surrounding story, not by the word.
Almost everything else the word does grows out of that one job, and what grows depends on what is attached to it.
- Attach the short word for "to" and the statement becomes possession: Ezra 4:16 warns that the king will have no share left beyond the River, literally that no share is his.
- Attach the short word for "in" and it locates something inside a person: Daniel 2:30 speaks of the wisdom that is in Daniel, and Daniel 3:25 of the fire doing no harm in the three men.
- Attach a pronoun ending and it becomes the "is" or "are" that joins a subject to what that subject is doing, so that Daniel 3:18 reads "we are not serving your gods."
That last use is the one English swallows whole. Nothing in the translation shows that a word is standing there at all; the sense is simply built into the English verb.
Its most memorable appearances are the flat, unadorned ones. Daniel tells Nebuchadnezzar that there is no man on earth who can do what the king is asking, and then turns the very same word around: there is a God in heaven who reveals mysteries. The book keeps working that contrast. There is no one else who can tell it. There is no other god who can rescue like this. There is no one who can stop his hand.
Nuances
How the opening of Daniel 3:17 is put together, and what the word for "there is" is doing in it.
- majorityThe word supports the statement about God's ability, so the sentence runs "if our God whom we serve is able to rescue us from the blazing furnace, he will rescue us." Most modern commentary and most modern translations read it this way.; John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); John E. Goldingay, Daniel, Word Biblical Commentary 30 (Dallas: Word, 1989)
- minorityThe pairing of "if" with this word is an idiom meaning "if it is so," pointing forward to what follows rather than qualifying God's ability, as in Ezra 5:17.; James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1927); Peter W. Coxon, "Daniel III 17: A Linguistic and Theological Problem," Vetus Testamentum 26 (1976): 400-409