past the normal measure: extraordinary, surpassing, or, attached to another word, exceedingly.
This word does not simply say that something is big or plentiful. It says that something has run past the usual limit. The word family behind it has to do with being left over, with going beyond the edge of what was counted, so the picture is of a measure that spills over the top.
It appears in only eight verses, all of them in the Aramaic chapters of Daniel, and it does two jobs there:
- it describes a thing as out of the ordinary, as with the dazzling brightness of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar's dream, the greatness handed back to the king after his madness, and the unusual mind found in Daniel
- it strengthens another description, pushing it to its extreme, as with a furnace heated past all reason and a beast more terrifying than any before it
Both jobs come from the same idea. Aramaic already had plain words for size and amount, and Daniel uses them in the same breath: the statue of chapter 2 is called large (רַב) and great (שַׂגִּיא) before its brightness is called extraordinary. Those words take the measure of a thing. This one says the measure has been exceeded.
That is why the word clusters where it does. Daniel uses it at the moments when something in the story breaks the scale: an image too bright to look at, a fire too hot to stand near, a mind too sharp to explain, a fourth beast that no earlier picture can hold.