to fall: to go down or come down, whether a body drops, a person goes face down before someone, or a power is brought low
This is the everyday Aramaic word for going down, and it works much the way the English verb "fall" does. Its plainest use is also its most physical one: three bound men drop into a furnace. Everything else the word does in Daniel and Ezra grows out of that simple picture of something coming down.
Most of its appearances belong to one scene. On the plain of Dura the royal order is that everyone fall down and worship the gold statue when the music sounds, and this is the verb for falling. On its own it names the posture only, not the reverence: the honor is carried by the word standing next to it, the Aramaic verb for paying homage (סְגִד). That is exactly why the story can turn on it. A whole plain of people going to the ground is something a bystander can watch, and three men left standing is something a bystander can report.
The remaining uses stretch the same picture in other directions:
- a voice falls out of heaven onto a king in mid sentence
- three horns fall away in front of a fourth one in a vision
- whatever else is needed for the temple falls to the man charged with supplying it
English can usually keep the word "fall" in all of these, but not always naturally, which is why translations differ most at these edges.