preciousness: the worth of what is rare and costly, and the honor or splendor that such worth confers.
At heart this is a word about worth. Something carries this word when it is rare and costly enough to be prized, and the same word then names the regard that such worth wins in public. The steps are short: what is scarce and heavy is valuable, what is valuable is treasured, and what is treasured is honored. So one word can label a vein of gold in a mine, the price paid for a life, the pomp of a rich man, and the honor a king bestows on a servant.
Because of that range, the word sits at four points along one line rather than splitting into unrelated meanings. In the Prophets and the wisdom books it usually means concrete treasure, the precious things a person or a city owns. Once, in Zechariah, it is the price at which someone is valued. In the book of Esther it becomes the public honor conferred by the king, and in Psalm 49 it is the fleeting splendor of the wealthy that death strips away.
Its closest Hebrew relative is כָּבוֹד, "glory", which travels the same road from weight to honor; the two stand side by side in Esther and often mean nearly the same thing. The difference scholars notice is one of flavor: glory leans toward the inner weight and substance of a person, even God, while this word leans toward preciousness and toward honor as something granted from outside and able to be taken back. It is also a relatively late arrival in Hebrew, shaped by the neighboring Aramaic language, which is why it clusters in Esther and in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel.
Nuances
Whether the phrase in this verse means "in his splendor / pomp" or, on a minority reading, "in the Mansion" as a name for the underworld.
- majority"In his splendor" or "in his pomp": the wealthy man, for all his display, does not last the night.; Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59, Continental Commentary (1988), pp. 480-486; Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50, WBC 19 (1983), pp. 355-364
- minority"In the Mansion", taking the word as a term for the underworld drawn from a Ugaritic parallel.; Mitchell Dahood, Psalms I: 1-50, Anchor Bible 16 (1966), pp. 296-302
Disputed
Which sense of the underlying root came first: a concrete "be heavy" that developed into "precious" and then "honored", or an interlocking set of senses (heavy, rare, precious) with none demonstrably prior.
- majorityNo single sense is demonstrably earliest; "heavy", "rare", and "precious" form an interlocking triad, since heavy goods were valuable, valuable goods were rare, and rare goods commanded honor.; S. Wagner, "יקר," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 6:278-284; R. Wakely, "יקר," in New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE) 2:506-515; Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch, 18th ed. (Donner et al., 2012), s.v. יקר
- minority"Be heavy" is the primary sense, from which "valuable" and "honored" developed, in parallel with the road from "be heavy" to "glory" in the related word kavod.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs, 1907), pp. 429-430, s.v. יקר