a human being; a person, especially in poetry, where the word often hints at how small and short-lived a person is.
This is a poetic word for a human being. It means roughly the same thing as the ordinary words for a person, but it belongs to the heightened language of poetry and prayer. It is rare in plain storytelling and turns up again and again in Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah.
Because it lives in those books, it keeps company with their favorite images: a person as grass that withers, as dust, as a creature who cannot stand on equal footing with God. When a poet reaches for this word in a setting like that, it carries a clear undertone of human frailty and mortality. The two most famous examples both open with it: "What is a mortal, that you are mindful of him?" and "Can a person be more in the right than God?" In each, the whole point is the gap between a frail human life and the God who made it.
But that undertone comes from the company the word keeps, not from the word itself. In other places it simply means a person, with no shadow of weakness at all: a happy human who keeps the Sabbath, an ordinary writing tool described as a "common" one, a friend who is a person's equal, the person whose heart is gladdened by wine. So frailty is a color the word often takes on, not a fixed part of its meaning.
There is also a purely grammatical reason this word is so common. Hebrew has no everyday plural for its usual word for a man, so it borrows the plural of this word to do that job. As a result, most times the word appears it is simply the plain plural "men" or "people," naming soldiers, townsfolk, or a leader's followers, and carries none of the poetry of the singular.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether "frailty, mortality" is a fixed part of this word's meaning or only a connotation that certain contexts activate.
- majorityThe note of weakness is a contextual connotation, not a lexical component: the word is essentially a poetic-register synonym for a human being, and frailty surfaces only where the surrounding imagery of dust, grass, and divine eternity calls it out. This now dominant reading rests on the uncertainty of the proposed "weakness" root and on the verses where no frailty frame is present (Isaiah 56:2; Psalm 104:15; Job 32:8).; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. אֱנוֹשׁ; D. J. A. Clines, ed., Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. אֱנוֹשׁ; James Barr, The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford, 1961)
- minorityThe word is genuinely loaded with the meaning "frail, perishable human," grounded in a root meaning "to be weak" or "incurable" and confirmed by its heavy concentration in passages contrasting a slight human with God.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. אֱנוֹשׁ; F. Maass, "אֱנוֹשׁ," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 1:345-348