son: a male child or descendant, and by extension one who belongs to a group or shares a quality
This is the ordinary Aramaic word for "son", the exact counterpart of the Hebrew בֵּן. At its core it names a male child, and it is the everyday building block of a name: someone is introduced as so-and-so, the son of his father, the way Zechariah is called the son of Iddo.
From that plain root the word stretches in the same directions its Hebrew twin does. In the plural it can name a whole people descended from one ancestor, as in the "sons of Israel". More often it heads the flexible phrase "son(s) of" something, where it no longer points to a father at all but to the class a person or thing belongs to:
- "sons of the exile" are the people carried off to Babylon
- "sons of men" is simply humankind
- "a son of the gods" is a heavenly being
- "one like a son of man" is a figure in human likeness
The same idiom counts the young of animals ("sons of oxen" are young bulls) and even measures age, so that a man "a son of sixty-two years" is sixty-two years old. In every use the word keeps its single sense of belonging, whether by birth, by descent, by category, or by age.