one born into a particular household or family line: a person identified by whose house or whose stock he was born to
This word never stands on its own. It always names the group a person was born into: born of a house, born of Anak, born of Rapha. So it is less a label for a type of person than an answer to the question "whose?" Hebrew has a word for someone native to the land rather than to a household (אֶזְרָח), and another that says only that a person was born at all (יִלּוֹד); this one always fastens someone to one specific house or one specific stock.
Most often that group is a household, and the picture the texts give is consistent:
- Abraham arms the men born in his house and trusts them on a rescue raid
- he circumcises them alongside his own son, bringing them inside the sign of the covenant
- servants born in a priest's house may eat the holy food that his hired workers may not
Being born into a house therefore meant belonging to it, not merely being owned by it. The texts also set these people beside the ones bought with money, which shows that how a servant entered a household was worth recording.
That background gives Jeremiah 2:14 its sting. The prophet asks whether Israel is a servant (עֶבֶד) or a slave born into the house, and the expected answer is no: Israel was God's son (בֵּן), so the plundering of the nation makes no sense.
The other group the word names is a family line, and each time it is a frightening one. The scouts sent into Canaan report seeing the offspring of Anak at Hebron, and David's soldiers keep cutting down oversized warriors described as born of Rapha. Joshua 15:14 sets two Hebrew expressions side by side, calling the same three men both the sons of Anak and those born of Anak, so here the word does much what בֵּן does, with the fact of birth pressed a little harder. English versions usually say "descendants" or "children" here and lose the tie to the household use.
Nuances
What the phrase rendered "born of Rapha" designates in 2 Samuel 21:16, 2 Samuel 21:18 and 1 Chronicles 20:4. The standard lexica read it as descent from an eponymous ancestor Rapha, hence the Rephaim of the giant traditions, so the Philistine champions are that line's offspring. Conrad L'Heureux argued instead that the expression names a cultic association of warriors devoted to a deity Rapha, making the men members of a guild rather than blood descendants. The proposal has been widely discussed but has not been adopted by the standard lexica.
- majorityDescendants of a family line traced to Rapha, that is, of the Rephaim; HALOT, s.v. יָלִיד; P. Kyle McCarter, II Samuel (Anchor Bible 9, 1984)
- minorityMembers of a warrior association devoted to a deity named Rapha, not blood descendants; Conrad E. L'Heureux, The yelîdê hārāpāʾ: A Cultic Association of Warriors, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 221 (1976): 83-85; Conrad E. L'Heureux, Rank Among the Canaanite Gods (Harvard Semitic Monographs 21, 1979)