StrongerBible

yeqar

יְקָר

AramaicH3367“honor, glory, ...”

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Dan 2:6Dan 2:37Dan 4:30(27)Dan 4:36(33)Dan 5:18Dan 5:20Dan 7:14
Word studyyeh-KAHRnoun

What yeqar means

honor: high public standing and splendor that someone greater grants to a person, and can take back.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is a court word. All seven of its uses sit in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel, and in every one of them the honor is something visible and public: not a private sense of worth, and not moral integrity, but the weight a person carries in the eyes of everyone watching. It belongs to the same family as the words for what is heavy and what is costly, so the picture underneath it is of something that has real substance rather than something merely felt.

The striking thing about the word in Daniel is that nobody ever produces it for himself. It is always handed over, worn for a while, and liable to be taken away. It shows up in three settings:

  • given by God to a king along with the kingdom, the power, and the might
  • held by a king as his own splendor, boasted in, stripped off, and handed back
  • awarded to a servant as the public reward for doing what the king asked

Those are three angles on one thing, not three different words. It is the honor God gives Nebuchadnezzar, the honor Nebuchadnezzar brags about, the honor stripped from him when he grows proud, and the honor handed back to him when he lifts his eyes to heaven; it is also what he offers his advisers as the prize for telling him his dream.

Aramaic has several words in this neighborhood and Daniel likes to stack them. The word for majesty (הֲדַר) stands beside ours three times and points to the outward trappings of a king; the word for greatness (רְבוּ) measures the sheer scale of his rule; the word for brightness (זִיו) names visible radiance, the shine on a face or an object. Ours is the standing itself. The Hebrew word spelled the same way (יְקָר) leans further toward price and preciousness, while the main Hebrew word for glory (כָּבוֹד) leans toward weight a person or God has in himself rather than weight conferred from outside.

Nuances

1aroyal glory granted from above: honor listed among the things God hands a ruler along with the kingdom itself.
Dan 2:37Dan 5:18Dan 7:14
1bthe splendor a ruler actually holds: what he boasts in, loses, and can be given back.
Dan 4:30(27)Dan 4:36(33)Dan 5:20
1ca public distinction awarded as a reward, named alongside gifts and payment.
TranslatabilityDirect
Dan 2:6

What scholars say about yeqar

Biblical Aramaic יְקָר is a nominal formation from the root yqr, "to be heavy, precious," cognate with Hebrew יְקָר (H3366) and with the Aramaic adjective יַקִּיר (H3358). BDB and HALOT gloss it uniformly as "honour, glory" and record no sub-division of the sense; the seven occurrences are confined to the Aramaic chapters of Daniel. In six of the seven the noun stands within a chain of royal abstractions (מַלְכוּ "kingdom," שָׁלְטָן "dominion," תְּקֹף "might," רְבוּ "greatness," הֲדַר "majesty"), a stereotyped court formula that the standard commentaries (Montgomery, Collins) treat as the diplomatic and administrative register of the Persian-period Aramaic chancellery; the remaining instance, Daniel 2:6, belongs instead to the vocabulary of royal largesse, coordinated with מַתְּנָן "gifts" and נְבִזְבָּה "reward." Commentators regularly note the theological weight the formula bears in the book: the grant made to Nebuchadnezzar in 2:37 and 5:18 is revoked in 5:20, and the same vocabulary is redeployed for the everlasting grant to the one like a son of man in 7:14, a correspondence usually read as deliberate. In post-biblical Jewish Aramaic the derived form yeqara becomes a standard Targumic equivalent of Hebrew כָּבוֹד and a reverential circumlocution for the divine presence, alongside memra and shekinta; that development lies outside the biblical corpus but is frequently cited in discussion of the Daniel passages.

Sources

  • HALOT, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, Aramaic section, s.v. יְקָרlexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs, 1907), Biblical Aramaic section, p. 1096, s.v. יְקָרlexicon
  • S. Wagner, "יקר," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) 6:278-284theological-dictionary
  • John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1993)commentary
  • J. A. Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, ICC (T&T Clark, 1927)commentary
  • Franz Rosenthal, A Grammar of Biblical Aramaic, 7th ed. (Harrassowitz, 2006)grammar

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

All attested forms of יְקָר

c s determined

וִיקָרָא, וִיקָרָה

Dan 2:37, Dan 5:18, Dan 5:20

c s absolute

וִיקָר

Dan 2:6, Dan 7:14

c s construct

וְלִיקַר, וְלִיקָר

Dan 4:36, Dan 4:30