gelah

Every use of this Aramaic verb in Daniel turns on a single picture: a covering comes away, and what was underneath is now in plain view. What gets uncovered is always a secret, and usually the specific secret of the dream Nebuchadnezzar refuses to describe, which his own advisers admit no one on earth can produce.

Daniel 2 presses that picture into a claim about God. The phrase "the one who uncovers secrets" is used of him three times in the chapter, so often that it works almost as a name, and the king finally repeats it back in Daniel 2:47. The claim is not that God is a good guesser. It is that the knowledge sits entirely on his side of the curtain and crosses over only if he lifts it.

That is why it matters that the same word can turn around, with the secret itself as the thing acted upon. When Daniel says the secret was uncovered to him, he immediately refuses the credit: it did not come from any wisdom of his own. The Aramaic keeps the giver and the receiver clearly apart, which is what gives the king's closing praise its edge. He calls God the uncoverer of secrets precisely because Daniel was able to uncover this one.

A companion word runs alongside it through the chapter, the Aramaic verb for knowing (יְדַע) in the sense of making something known. The two are not the same job: one lifts the cover, the other passes the news along.

Both places this meaning appears look back on the same kind of event: an empire empties a country of its people and plants them somewhere else. Ezra 4:10 has officials in Samaria describing themselves as the peoples an Assyrian king moved in. Ezra 5:12 has the elders of Judah admitting that Nebuchadnezzar pulled down the temple and took the people off to Babylon.

In both verses the deporting is done to the people and never by them. They are on the receiving end of a stronger power, and the word takes for granted that a conquering king stands behind the act.

The link with uncovering is not an accident of spelling. The same word pictures something laid bare, whether that is a secret with its cover pulled off or a land emptied of the people who filled it. The Hebrew relative גָּלָה behaves the same way, which is why one Hebrew verb serves both for uncovering a hidden thing and for going into exile.