StrongerBible

deqaq

דְּקַק

AramaicH1855break in pieces, crush, ...

Appears 10 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Dan 2:34Dan 2:35Dan 2:40 (2×)Dan 2:44Dan 2:45Dan 6:24(25)Dan 7:7Dan 7:19Dan 7:23
Word studydeh-KAHKverb

What deqaq means

to shatter a thing to pieces: to break it apart so completely that nothing is left to gather up.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This verb belongs entirely to the book of Daniel, and almost entirely to one picture: something hard being struck until it comes apart. A stone cut from a mountain hits the statue in the king's dream and the metals break in pieces. Lions close on the men thrown into the den and their bones are crushed before they reach the floor. The word is not about the blow itself. It is about what the blow leaves behind.

What it leaves behind is nothing. Daniel 2:35 is the one place where the word turns around and describes the material giving way rather than someone breaking it: iron, clay, bronze, silver and gold come apart together, the wind carries them off like chaff from a summer threshing floor, and no trace of them is found. That verse sets the measure for every other use. The neighboring Aramaic verbs name the parts of the action this one does not, such as the striking (מְחָא) and the treading down of whatever is left (רְפַס).

From there the word carries Daniel's whole account of empire, and it works the same way at every stage:

  • the kingdom of iron breaks in pieces everything that came before it
  • the fourth beast crushes whatever it does not devour, then tramples the rest
  • the kingdom God sets up breaks all of those kingdoms and is never broken itself

Empires, in other words, are being described the way the statue is described: as hard things that can be shattered, and that eventually are. The Hebrew verb from the same root (דָּקַק) takes the action one step further, on to the fine powder a reforming king scatters over graves so an idol can never be recast. Daniel's Aramaic verb stops at the breaking, and lets the chaff blowing off the threshing floor finish the thought.

Nuances

1ato smash a solid thing so that it falls apart and cannot be put back together.
Dan 2:34Dan 2:45Dan 6:24(25)
1bof the thing struck: to come apart, to crumble away until nothing of it is left.
Dan 2:35
1cof a kingdom or a beast: to smash other powers to pieces, ending them for good.
Dan 2:40 (2×)Dan 2:44Dan 7:7Dan 7:19Dan 7:23

What scholars say about deqaq

BDB and HALOT treat Biblical Aramaic דְּקַק as a single root with no semantic split: the pe'al is intransitive ("be shattered, be broken in pieces", Dan 2:35) and the haph'el is causative ("shatter, break in pieces"), which between them account for all ten occurrences, every one of them in Daniel. The root corresponds to Hebrew דָּקַק "be fine, crush fine", and the lexica identify the same semantic center in both, the fineness of the resulting fragments, though the Aramaic attestations press the shattering while the Hebrew attestations frequently name the resulting עָפָר. The chaff simile of Dan 2:35 (כְּעוּר מִן־אִדְּרֵי־קַיִט) is the lexica's own warrant for glossing the pe'al as reduction to something the wind carries off rather than as mere fracture. Commentators on Daniel treat the verb as a structural keyword of the two vision cycles: Collins (Hermeneia) and Goldingay (WBC) both trace the stone's הַדֵּקֶת in 2:34 through the interpretation in 2:44 to 45 and into the fourth-beast material of chapter 7, where the haph'el participle (7:7, 7:19) and the imperfect of 7:23 assimilate the beast's behavior to the iron of the statue. The collocation with חֲשַׁל and רְעַע in 2:40 is generally read as intensifying repetition rather than as a distinction between separate actions, and the pairing with רְפַס "trample" in 7:7 and 7:19 as sequential. No lexical dispute attaches to the verb; the long-running interpretive debates in these chapters concern the identification of the kingdoms and the date of the book, not the sense of the word.

Sources

  • HALOT, s.v. דקק (Biblical Aramaic)lexicon
  • BDB, Biblical Aramaic section, s.v. דְּקַקlexicon
  • John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993)commentary
  • John E. Goldingay, Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary 30; Dallas: Word, 1989)commentary

All attested forms of דְּקַק

haphel imperfect 3fs

תַּדִּק

Dan 2:40, Dan 2:44

haphel participle f s absolute

מַדֱּקָה, מַדֲּקָה

Dan 7:7, Dan 7:19

haphel perfect 3fs

הַדֵּקֶת, הַדֶּקֶת

Dan 2:34, Dan 2:45

haphel conjunctive-imperfect 3fs

וְתַדְּקִנַּ

Dan 7:23

haphel participle m s absolute

מְהַדֵּק

Dan 2:40

haphel perfect 3mp

הַדִּקוּ

Dan 6:24

peal perfect 3mp

דָּקוּ

Dan 2:35