StrongerBible

ḥezev

חֱזוּ

AramaicH2376“vision, appearance, ...”

Appears 12 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Dan 2:19Dan 2:28Dan 4:5(2)Dan 4:9(6)Dan 4:10(7)Dan 4:13(10)Dan 7:1Dan 7:2Dan 7:7Dan 7:13Dan 7:15Dan 7:20
Root family
Word studykheh-ZOOnoun

What ḥezev means

1

a vision: the sight God gives a person at night, the imagery a dream is made of

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This word belongs entirely to the Aramaic chapters of Daniel, and every time it appears it names something shown to a person at night. It is not the word for the dream itself. Aramaic has a separate word for that (חֵלֶם), and Daniel puts the two side by side: the king has a dream, and inside that dream are the sights this word describes. So it points at the pictures, not at the sleep.

Daniel says it in two settled phrases:

  • "the visions of my head" (or your head, his head), meaning the pictures that ran through someone's mind as they lay on the bed
  • "in a vision of the night", which names when and how the message arrived rather than what was in it

The difference is one of angle, not of substance: both are sights sent in the dark, and Daniel can move from one phrase to the other inside a single chapter. The second phrase does not always say the man was asleep, which is why the night vision of Daniel 2:19 is read by some as coming to a waking Daniel after prayer.

Two things follow for a reader. The word says nothing about whether the sight was understood; Nebuchadnezzar's head visions terrify him precisely because he cannot read them, and Daniel's do the same to Daniel in Daniel 7:15. And it is almost always plural, because a dream is a run of images rather than one still picture, which is why English Bibles usually print "visions" here.

Nuances

1athe imagery inside a dream, spoken of as the visions of a person's head
Dan 2:28Dan 4:5(2)Dan 4:9(6)Dan 4:10(7)Dan 4:13(10)Dan 7:1Dan 7:15
1ba night vision: the setting in which a revelation came, rather than the pictures it contained
Dan 2:19Dan 7:2Dan 7:7Dan 7:13
2

the look of something: how big or imposing it seems to the eye

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintyStrong

Once, in Daniel 7:20, the word steps outside the world of sleep. Daniel is describing the last horn that pushed up among the ten, the one with eyes and a boasting mouth, and he says its look was greater than the others alongside it. Nothing revelatory is in view here, just the size and bearing a thing has when you set it beside its neighbors.

The two uses are the same idea turned around. In the first, a sight is given to a person; here, a thing presents a sight of its own. Hebrew does the same double duty with its own word for how a thing looks (מַרְאֶה), which covers both a prophet's vision and the plain appearance of a face, so this is a normal stretch for a word built on seeing rather than an oddity.

Dan 7:20

What scholars say about ḥezev

The Aramaic noun חֱזוּ is confined to the Aramaic portion of Daniel (12 occurrences) and is a verbal noun of חֲזָה, "to see." The Aramaic lexica arrange it under two headings. Under "vision" they subdivide by the two stereotyped constructions: חֶזְוֵי רֵאשׁ, "visions of the head" (Dan 2:28; 4:2, 7, 10; 7:1, 15 in the Aramaic verse numbering, i.e. English 2:28; 4:5, 10, 13; 7:1, 15), together with חֶזְוֵי חֶלְמִי in Dan 4:6 (English 4:9); and בְּחֶזְוָא דִי לֵילְיָא / בְּחֶזְוֵי לֵילְיָא, "in a vision of the night" (Dan 2:19; 7:2, 7, 13). Under "appearance" they place Dan 7:20, where the noun with a pronominal suffix predicates of the eleventh horn חֶזְוַהּ רַב מִן־חַבְרָתַהּ. See BDB's Aramaic section and HALOT vol. 5 (Aramaic) s.v.; Vogt's Lexicon Linguae Aramaicae Veteris Testamenti gives the same distribution, and Rosenthal's Grammar of Biblical Aramaic treats the nominal formation. Commentators on Daniel (Montgomery, ICC; Collins, Hermeneia; Goldingay, WBC) consistently distinguish חֵלֶם, the enveloping dream, from חֱזוּ, the visionary content within it, and read the night visions of Daniel 7 as the literary vehicle of that chapter's revelation. Jepsen's TDOT article on the Hebrew root חזה supplies the wider semantic background of "seeing" as revelatory perception. The Greek versions of Daniel render the noun with ὅραμα and ὅρασις.

Sources

  • The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), vol. 5: Aramaic, s.v. חֱזוּlexicon
  • Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, Aramaic section, s.v. חֱזוּlexicon
  • Ernst Vogt, Lexicon Linguae Aramaicae Veteris Testamenti (Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1971), s.v. חֱזוּlexicon
  • Franz Rosenthal, A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, 7th ed. (Harrassowitz, 2006)grammar
  • James A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel (International Critical Commentary; T&T Clark, 1927)commentary
  • John J. Collins, Daniel (Hermeneia; Fortress, 1993)commentary
  • John E. Goldingay, Daniel (Word Biblical Commentary 30; Word, 1989)commentary
  • A. Jepsen, "ḥāzâ," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), vol. 4theological-dictionary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of חֱזוּ

m p construct

חֶזְוֵי

Dan 2:28, Dan 4:5, Dan 4:9, Dan 4:10, Dan 4:13, Dan 7:1, Dan 7:7, Dan 7:13

c s construct

חֶזְוִי

Dan 7:2

c s construct

חֶזְוַהּ

Dan 7:20

c s determined

חֶזְוָא

Dan 2:19