kenat

The Biblical Aramaic noun כְּנָת is glossed "colleague, associate, fellow official" in every standard lexicon (HALOT, s.v. כְּנָת; BDB 1096b; DCH, s.v. כְּנָת; Vogt-Fitzmyer, A Lexicon of Biblical Aramaic, s.v.), and none posits a second sense. It occurs seven times, always plural and always with a pronominal suffix: כְּנָוָתְהוֹן in Ezra 4:9, 4:17, 4:23, 5:3, 6:6, 6:13, and כְנָוָתֵהּ in Ezra 5:6; the Hebrew narrative frame at Ezra 4:7 supplies the corresponding Hebrew כְּנָוֹתָיו, catalogued separately as H3674. The plural stem in waw points to an underlying form with a third radical waw, and the noun is generally taken as a loanword from Akkadian kinattu(m), "colleague, fellow servant" (CAD K, s.v. kinattu), rather than a native derivative, though the derivation is not the object of consensus argument in the lexica. Documentary Achaemenid Aramaic confirms the usage abundantly: the construction "PN and his colleagues" (knwt- plus suffix) is standard formula language for a collegium of officers acting as a single body, as in the Elephantine petitions where Yedaniah is named with "his colleagues the priests" (Porten and Yardeni, Textbook of Aramaic Documents from Ancient Egypt, A4.7 to A4.8 = Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., nos. 30 to 31). Commentators on Ezra read the biblical instances the same way: Williamson (Ezra, Nehemiah, WBC 16) and Blenkinsopp (Ezra-Nehemiah, OTL) both take "and his colleagues" as bureaucratic formula language designating fellow provincial officers rather than personal associates, and both weigh its presence in the assessment of the documentary character of Ezra 4 to 6; Fitzmyer's studies of the Aramaic epistolary formulae make the same point on comparative grounds. The one adjacent crux is not lexical: the appositional list that follows "and the rest of their colleagues" in Ezra 4:9 (דִּינָיֵא and the gentilics after it) is read by some as ethnic designations and by others, with different vocalization, as official titles such as "judges", but that question concerns the list, not the sense of כְּנָת.