the inside of something: the middle of a place, an object, or a document, used to say that something is in it, goes into it, or comes out of it
This word almost never stands on its own. It is joined to a short word meaning "in", "into", or "out of", and the pair does the work English does with "inside" or "in the middle of". The noun itself carries only the idea of an interior, and it takes its color from whatever it is the inside of.
Daniel 3 runs the whole range through one story. The same word marks every stage of the trip through the furnace:
- the three men are thrown into the middle of the blazing furnace
- the king sees four men walking about in the middle of the fire
- he calls them to come out of the middle of the fire
That plain physical use accounts for most of the times the word appears.
The interior does not have to be a container. A tree can stand at the middle of the land, trouble can be stirred up inside a walled city, and a person can feel dread inside himself. The most surprising use is an official one: in Ezra, a letter and a royal scroll each have words "written in it", literally written in its inside, so the phrase points at what the document says.
Aramaic uses this word the way Hebrew uses תָּוֶךְ, the word that supplies "in the midst of" all through the Hebrew Bible. The two do such similar work that a reader crossing from the Aramaic chapters of Daniel and Ezra into the Hebrew around them will not notice any change.