to eat: to take something in and use it up, whether food into a body, flesh into a beast, or a country into a conquering power
This is the plain Aramaic word for eating, the exact counterpart of the Hebrew verb for eating (אָכַל). Biblical Aramaic covers only a few chapters, so all seven of its uses fall inside Daniel, and not one of them is a quiet meal. What gets eaten in Daniel is always startling:
- grass, chewed by a king who has been driven out to live like an animal
- flesh, torn by the beasts of a night vision
- the whole earth, swallowed by the kingdom those beasts stand for
- a man's good name, chewed at by rivals who "eat his pieces"
The backbone of the word is destruction by consumption. Daniel 7 uses it of the fourth beast, whose partner verb is the one for smashing something to powder (דְּקַק); the two verbs together say that nothing survives the animal's mouth. When the angel explains the vision, the same verb moves from the beast to the empire it pictures, which will "devour the whole earth". Eating is how this book talks about conquest.
Twice the word appears in a fixed expression that has nothing to do with food. To "eat the pieces of" someone is to denounce that person, and English Bibles rightly print it as "accused". The phrase was already old in the region's court language, and it pictures an accuser tearing at his victim out of sight, the way a scavenger works on a carcass. The verb keeps its ordinary force inside the phrase; it is the whole expression, not the verb by itself, that carries the sense of a damaging charge.