a noble: one of the free-born leading men of a town or province, whose weight came from his family and his land rather than from an appointment.
The Bible only ever uses this word in the plural, and that is a clue to what it means. It never points at one titled gentleman; it points at a class, the free-born heads of the leading households, the men in a town or province who counted for something because of who their families were and what they owned.
That is why they turn up wherever local business had to be settled by the men who mattered:
- Jezebel writes to the elders (זָקֵן) and the nobles of Naboth's town to arrange his judicial murder, and they do exactly as the letters say.
- Nehemiah addresses the nobles together with the province's appointed officials (סָגָן) each time he organizes the wall, its guard, and the registry of the returned families.
- Babylon carries off "the nobles of Judah" with the exiled king, and later kills them, because removing them was how you dismantled a country.
The other half of the word is freedom. Behind it lies the idea of being free rather than owned, which is why Ecclesiastes can call a good king "a son of nobles": not a compliment about his manners, but a statement about his birth. He comes of free stock and is fit to rule, unlike the boy king of the verse before him.
Being a noble says nothing about being good. Most of the word's appearances are in Nehemiah, and there the nobles are the very people he confronts: they lend to their own countrymen at interest, they exchange letters with Tobiah, who is working against the rebuilding, and they let the sabbath be trampled. The word names their standing, not their character.