a lion: the grown animal in its full strength, and in the female form a lioness
Hebrew has roughly six words for a lion, and this is one of the rarer ones. It never turns up in a plain narrative sentence about a beast that walked out of a thicket. It belongs to blessings, poems, and prophetic oracles, so where the everyday word (אַרְיֵה) can appear anywhere, this one arrives with the lift of verse.
That is why it so often stands beside another lion word in the same breath. Judah crouches and lies down like a lion, and like a lion, and who will rouse him? Balaam says the same of Israel twice over. Isaiah sets it next to the young lions (כְּפִיר) whose roaring belongs to the coming invader. Hebrew poetry likes to say a thing twice in different words, and this is one of the words the poets kept for the second line. In English both lines come out as "lion," so the pairing that carried the verse quietly disappears.
Whatever it is applied to, the picture is the same: an animal that has already taken its prey and cannot be pulled off it. The words around it are tearing, seizing, devouring, and dragging the kill back to the den. So the comparisons it draws are not compliments about nobility. They are warnings that nothing will stop what is coming:
- a people rising up that will not lie down until it has devoured
- an invading army whose roaring leaves no one to rescue the prey
- God himself meeting his people and devouring them where they stand
The female form of the word is the Bible's word for a lioness. Ezekiel asks the princes of Judah what their mother was and answers that she was a lioness, lying down among lions and raising her cubs, and Nahum has the lion of Nineveh strangling prey for his lionesses. It is one and the same Hebrew word in both directions, which no English translation can show.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether לָבִיא is a marked term for a lioness or a mature, full-grown lion, or is a gender-neutral poetic word for "lion" largely interchangeable with Hebrew's other lion terms.
- majorityA general, gender-neutral poetic word for "lion." Hebrew's several lion words function largely as synonyms chosen for parallelism and variety rather than as a graded scale of age, sex, or species; only the explicitly feminine forms (לְבִיָּא and the feminine plural) are marked for "lioness."; B. A. Strawn, What Is Stronger than a Lion? Leonine Image and Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (OBO 212; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); HALOT, s.v. לָבִיא; DCH, s.v. לָבִיא
- minorityA marked term for a lioness, or for a mature, full-grown lion. The older lexical tradition, together with medieval Jewish exegesis that sorted the lion vocabulary by age and size, distinguished this word from the common lion term, and the Arabic cognate for "lioness" keeps the female nuance open for the masculine form.; BDB, s.v. לָבִיא; Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, s.v. לָבִיא