hadar

The major lexica and theological dictionaries (BDB, HALOT, Gesenius 18th ed., Warmuth in TDOT, Hill in NIDOTTE, TWOT) agree on a semantic range running from ornament and beauty, through splendor and majesty, to honor and dignity, and most now treat the Hebrew data as a single root rather than positing a separate homonym meaning to swell (that older proposal, entertained by BDB, rests on the textually unstable Isaiah 45:2, where the Greek presupposes mountains). Warmuth locates the core in honor that becomes visible; Hill weights the visual pole of ornamented radiance, while Newman weights the honorific pole of conferred status. The comparative-Semitic picture has narrowed under recent work: the old link to Akkadian adaru (to fear, to be dark) is rejected by Assyriologists, and the proposed Ugaritic cognate hdrt has been reassigned to a word for dream or vision (Greenfield; Tropper; DULAT), leaving Aramaic and Syriac as the firm cognates, where the root plainly means to adorn, honor, and glorify. The Septuagint uses no single Greek equivalent but spreads the word across doxa, time, megaloprepeia, and aesthetic terms such as horaiotes and kallos, evidence that Greek-speaking Jews already heard it at both poles. A rare vowel-variant of the noun, heder, occurs once, at Daniel 11:20, for the splendor of the kingdom. Two textual cruxes bear on the word: the phrase in holy hadar (Psalm 29:2; 96:9; 1 Chronicles 16:29) is read as either sacred attire or the splendor of holiness, and Psalm 110:3 is unstable between holy array and holy mountains.