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