behal

This is the word the book of Daniel uses for the panic that grips a king in the night. A dream, a stray thought, or a vision comes, and the person is thrown into a dread they cannot control: Nebuchadnezzar on his bed, Belshazzar at his feast, Daniel himself after his visions. The disturbance is sudden and total, closer to being overwhelmed than to merely being worried.

The same word covers both sides of that experience. In its active form something outside the person does the alarming, whether a dream, the writing on the wall, or a vision in the head. In its turned-back form the person is simply left shaken, as Belshazzar is when the color drains from his face. Either way the picture is a mind knocked off balance by fear.

It sits close to the ordinary word for being afraid (דְּחַל), but where that word is a steady dread of something, this one is the jolt of sudden panic. It is the exact match of the Hebrew verb (בָּהַל), which carries the same pairing of alarm and hurried reaction.

When people in Daniel are overwhelmed, they move fast. This is the flip side of the alarm: the hurried, agitated action that fear or urgency drives. Arioch rushes Daniel into the king's presence, Nebuchadnezzar springs to his feet when he sees a fourth figure in the fire, and Darius hurries to the lions' den at first light, desperate to know whether Daniel survived.

English usually renders it plainly as "in haste," and that is the surface sense. But it is the same word as the terror that runs through the rest of the book, so the haste it names is never merely being quick. It is the rushing of someone stirred up, pressed by dread or hope into sudden motion.