a tail: the hindmost part of an animal, and so the trailing end or the lowest place of anything
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
The plain sense is an animal's tail, and the Hebrew Bible uses it the way English does. Moses is told to reach out and take a snake by the tail. Samson catches three hundred foxes and ties them together tail to tail with a torch between each pair. The poem describing the great beast in Job says it stiffens its tail like a cedar.
Because a tail is the part that comes last, the word also names the trailing end of something that is not an animal at all. Isaiah calls two burnt down sticks the tails of the firebrands: the charred stubs left behind after the fire has eaten its way forward. Nothing about the image is flattering. A tail is what follows, what is left over, what nobody notices first.
That is why the word became a standard way of talking about rank. Set beside the word for head (רֹאשׁ), it marks the bottom of a society against its top:
Deuteronomy promises an obedient Israel that it will be the head and not the tail, then warns that a disobedient Israel will watch the foreigner living among it do the lending while Israel does the borrowing, he the head and Israel the tail
Isaiah pictures a nation stripped of every kind of leader, from the honored elder at the top down to the lying prophet at the bottom
Isaiah says the same of Egypt, where nothing anyone attempts will succeed, whether head or tail
In none of these does the word say anything about animals. It says who comes last.
Nuances
1athe tail of an animal
TranslatabilityDirect
Exo 4:4Jdg 15:4 (3×)Job 40:17*
Job 40:17
What the tail of Behemoth in Job 40:17 refers to.
majorityThe ordinary sense of tail, the poem picturing a tail held stiff and strong like a cedar.; HALOT, s.v. זָנָב; DCH, s.v. זָנָב
minorityA euphemism for the animal's sexual organ, a reading tied to identifying Behemoth as the hippopotamus, whose tail is small.; Marvin H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible 15, 3rd ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973)
1bthe burnt down end of a stick: its stub
TranslatabilityDirect
Isa 7:4
1cthe tail end of a people: the last and lowest, set against the head
Deu 28:13Deu 28:44Isa 9:14(13)Isa 9:15(14)Isa 19:15
Hebrew treats the tail as a settled image for the lowest rank in a society, so calling a nation the tail is a claim about status rather than about anatomyDeu 28:44Isa 9:14
the same word names the charred end of a burnt stick, a use English would never file under "tail"Isa 7:4
Both
both name the part at the very back of an animal, the part a person can take hold ofExo 4:4Job 40:17
Only tail
English "tail" also means the reverse of a coin, the back of a queue, or someone following a suspect, and in casual speech it can be crude; none of that sits in the Hebrew word
“stump”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
“stub”
Comparison data is not available for this English gloss yet.
How zanav differs from similar Hebrew words
רֹאשׁhead: the paired opposite, the top of a body or of a society, and the word this one is set against whenever rank is in view.
Names a real animal's tail, the hind part a person can take hold of or tie: a snake caught by it, foxes bound to one another by theirs, the great beast of the poem holding its own stiff like a cedar.Exo 4:4Jdg 15:4Job 40:17
Reaches past animals to the trailing end of an object, the charred stub of a stick that has already burned down, so the word can carry the sense of what is spent and left behind.Isa 7:4
Both
Both name a part at one end of a living body, and Isaiah puts them together to picture a nation cut off at both ends on a single day.Isa 9:14
Set against each other they become the stock picture of rank, the top of a people against its bottom, with lending and borrowing spelling out what each position actually means.Deu 28:13Deu 28:44
Paired as opposites they take in everyone with nobody left out, so saying that neither one can accomplish anything for Egypt means that no one in the country can.Isa 19:15
Names the person in charge, the chief of a family or a clan, so it supplies the ordinary Hebrew word for a leader.Exo 6:14Exo 6:25
Names the top of a tall thing, the summit of a mountain drying out after the flood or the top of a tower built to reach the sky.Gen 8:5Gen 11:4
Marks what comes first in time or first in worth, the opening month of Israel's year and the finest of the spices measured out for the holy oil.Exo 12:2Exo 30:23
Works as a counting word for the total of a group, the sum arrived at when a people is numbered.Exo 30:12
קָצֶהend or outer edge: the neutral word for where something stops, with none of the sense of trailing behind or of ranking last.
Names a real body part on a real animal, the tail you can take hold of or look at: the snake Moses seizes, the foxes Samson ties together, the beast whose tail stiffens like a cedar.Exo 4:4Jdg 15:4Job 40:17
Carries rank and status, not measurement: to be the tail is to be the one who follows and obeys, the bottom of the pecking order, set against the head who leads.Deu 28:13Deu 28:44Isa 9:15
Belongs to a picture of a living body, so it can stand for a whole society imagined as one creature that has been crippled from top to bottom.Isa 9:14Isa 19:15
Both
Both can name the far tip of a handheld object rather than the whole of it: the burnt stubs of two firebrands, the point of the staff an angel stretches out or a rod dipped into honey.Isa 7:4Jdg 6:211Sa 14:27
Both name a far extreme, so each can be paired with its opposite to say "the whole thing": head and tail for a whole people, one end of the earth to the other for the whole world.Isa 9:14Deu 13:7
Marks a boundary line on the map: where one territory stops and the next begins, and where a tribe's allotted land runs out.Gen 47:21Jos 15:1Num 22:36
Names the outer fringe of a crowd or a settlement: the edge of the camp where fire breaks out, the last of the people a watcher can see, the outermost guard post reached at night.Num 11:1Num 22:41Jdg 7:19
Measures time as well as space, closing off a stretch of days or years: at the end of so many days, so many years, so many months.Gen 8:3Deu 14:282Sa 24:8
Reaches to the limits of the known world, naming the farthest place a nation could come from or a scattered people be gathered from.Deu 28:49Deu 30:4
zanav in the other biblical languages
οὐράGreek“tail”the Greek word for a tail, used in Revelation of the tails of the locusts, the horses, and the dragon; it is always a real tail there and never the picture of low rank.
Only the Hebrew word works as a picture of rank, where being the "tail" means being at the bottom and the "head" means being on top, whether that is one nation set over another or a people led by men who lie to them.Deu 28:13Deu 28:44Isa 9:14Isa 9:15Isa 19:15
The Hebrew word can name the burnt-down stub at the end of a torch, used of two kings whose fire has nearly gone out.Isa 7:4
In Hebrew narrative the tail is the end a person takes hold of, the handle by which a frightening creature is picked up.Exo 4:4
Both
Both name the plain physical tail of a creature, with no figure of speech involved: foxes tied together by theirs, locusts and horses wearing theirs, a dragon dragging one behind it.Jdg 15:4Rev 9:10Rev 12:4
In both languages the tail is where a creature's strength or threat is put on display, so describing the tail alone is enough to say how formidable the beast is.Job 40:17Rev 9:19
In the New Testament the tail is always the part that does the damage: the locusts sting with their tails, and the horses' tails bite like snakes with heads on the end of them.Rev 9:10Rev 9:19
The Greek word can describe a tail on a scale nothing living has, sweeping a third of the stars out of the sky.Rev 12:4
What scholars say about zanav
The standard lexicons (BDB, HALOT, DCH) treat זָנָב as a single noun with a straightforward development: the tail of an animal (Exod 4:4;Judg 15:4;Job 40:17), the burnt off end or stump of a firebrand (Isa 7:4), and a metaphor for the lowest element of a body politic in antithesis to רֹאשׁ (Deut 28:13, 44; Isa 9:13-14 [Eng 9:14-15]; 19:15). The head-and-tail antithesis of Deuteronomy 28 belongs to the blessing-and-curse tradition of ancient Near Eastern treaty texts, in which status inversion is a stock curse motif; Tigay (JPS Deuteronomy) reads it together with the adjacent lending-and-borrowing imagery as a picture of political and economic subjection. In Isa 9:13 (Eng 9:14) the merism head/tail alongside palm-branch/reed sweeps in the whole population, and the following verse supplies an identification that many critics, Wildberger among them, regard as a later explanatory gloss. The one genuinely disputed occurrence is Job 40:17, where Pope (Anchor Bible) argues for a euphemistic reading tied to the identification of Behemoth as the hippopotamus, while the lexicons retain the plain sense.