to live somewhere: to have one's home in a place and stay settled there
This is the plain Aramaic verb for living somewhere. It says nothing about the kind of home, the length of the stay, or the standing of the resident. It simply puts someone in a place and treats them as settled there rather than passing through. In the Aramaic chapters of Daniel almost anything that has a home can be its subject:
- whole peoples spread across an empire (Daniel 2:38)
- birds making their home in a tree's branches (Daniel 4:12)
- wild animals sheltering underneath that same tree (Daniel 4:21)
Its most memorable use is a sweeping phrase, "all who live on the earth." Two royal letters open by addressing exactly that audience, so that the king's word is presented as reaching every person alive (Daniel 4:1; Daniel 6:25). When Nebuchadnezzar finally praises the God of heaven, the same phrase turns back on him: everyone living on the earth counts as nothing beside the One who does as he pleases (Daniel 4:35).
One small detail shows how ordinary the word is. The tree dream is told twice. In the first telling this verb puts the birds in the branches (Daniel 4:12); in the retelling a few lines later the birds get a different verb for settling in (שְׁכֵן) and this one describes the animals under the tree instead (Daniel 4:21). The two words are close enough to trade places. Aramaic also has יְתִב for sitting or taking a seat, used of thrones and of a court in session, and the noun built from the verb here, מְדוֹר, names the dwelling place itself, which is how Daniel describes the years Nebuchadnezzar spent living among the animals.