aryeh

The standard lexica treat the shorter אֲרִי and the fuller אַרְיֵה as one lexeme, the general Hebrew term for the lion and by far the most frequent of the language's lion words; the plural is normally אֲרָיוֹת, with the anomalous אֲרָיִים only at 1 Kings 10:20. On etymology, HALOT and comparative Semitists reconstruct an inherited term for a wild or fierce beast that narrowed in Hebrew to "lion" (compare Ge'ez ʾarwē "wild beast," Akkadian aru "eagle," Arabic ʾarwā "ibexes," Aramaic and Syriac אריא), and regard the older derivation from אָרָה "to pluck, tear" as folk etymology. On the lexeme field, the dominant position since Brent A. Strawn's monograph is that אַרְיֵה, כְּפִיר, לָבִיא, לַיִשׁ, שַׁחַל and שָׁחַץ function largely as poetic synonyms selected for parallelism, meter and wordplay, with גּוּר "cub" the one securely age-specific term; the internal evidence is that one animal can be called by three of them within a few verses (Judges 14:5-18) and that Job 4:10-11 stacks five for rhetorical density. Anna Angelini has recently argued that a relative taxonomy, including gendered and behavioral distinctions, can still be recovered from the vocabulary and the ancient versions, while Noegel and Nichols show the poets exploiting the multiplicity for sound-play. Strawn's four-referent grid (self or righteous, enemy or wicked, monarch or mighty one, deity) organizes the metaphorical range, and the divine-predator strand (Hosea 5:14; 13:7-8; Amos 1:2; 3:8; Jeremiah 25:38; Lamentations 3:10) is now treated as a deliberate and central feature of Israel's God-language rather than an embarrassment. The Septuagint largely collapses the Hebrew field into λέων and σκύμνος, with occasional λέαινα and πανθήρ, which corroborates the near-synonymy from the ancient translators' side. Two verses remain text-critically live: Psalm 22:17 (Eng. 16) and Isaiah 21:8, where 1QIsaiah-a reads a word for the lookout in place of the Masoretic "lion."