to write: to set words down in lasting form, whether traced on a wall, sent in a letter, or entered in an official record
This verb turns up only in the Aramaic parts of Ezra and Daniel, and almost everything it describes happens in or around a royal court. Writing there is rarely private. A king publishes an order to every people under his rule, provincial officials send a complaint to the capital, a delegation takes down the names of the men in charge, and years later a search of the royal archives turns up a scroll and reports what it says.
The same plain verb covers scenes that feel very different from one another:
- a hand appearing at a banquet and tracing letters into the plaster of the wall
- a king addressing a decree to all peoples, nations, and languages
- two officials putting an accusation about a building project into a letter
- a man setting down a dream he had seen so that it would not be lost
What holds these together is that written words are fixed. Once something is written it can be sent, produced, checked, and used again later, which is exactly why these two books keep returning to it.
Aramaic keeps the act apart from its results. The written thing, an inscription or a signed document, has its own word (כְּתָב), and there is a separate verb for putting a signature to a decree so that it cannot be revoked, also used of the marking already standing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast (רְשַׁם). This word is the writing itself.