iddan

The noun is confined to Biblical Aramaic and within it to Daniel (2:8, 9, 21; 3:5, 15; 4:13, 20, 22, 29 [English 4:16, 23, 25, 32]; 7:12, 25), and is absent from the Aramaic of Ezra. The lexica converge closely. BDB's Aramaic appendix organizes the entry in two senses, (1) time as duration (2:8; 7:12) and point of time (3:5, 15), including time involving specific conditions (2:9, 21), and (2) definite time, equal to year, citing the seven periods of Daniel 4 and glossing 7:25 as three and a half years with the note that one might read a dual for the plural (after Bevan and Gunkel); it also floats the loan from Assyrian adannu. HALOT's Aramaic volume gives time, point of time, period; Vogt and Fitzmyer's Lexicon of Biblical Aramaic, the most current stand-alone Biblical Aramaic lexicon and the most attentive to the Qumran material, gives time, appointed time. The Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon carries the lexeme across Imperial Aramaic, Qumran Aramaic, the Targumim, Jewish Palestinian and Babylonian Aramaic, and Syriac (eddana), and Sokoloff (DJPA, DJBA) and Jastrow record its later life. No major lexicon makes year the base sense: recent lexicography treats it as a contextual value the word takes in Daniel 4, where the two ancient interpretive options are the Old Greek's hepta ete against Theodotion's hepta kairoi, with the Vulgate's tempora.

On etymology the center of gravity is Akkadian adannu (also adanu, hadanu), appointed time, fixed date, term, deadline (CAD A/1, 99; AHw, festgesetzte Zeit, Termin), attested from Old Babylonian and in lexical lists, and idiomatically construed with kasadu for the arrival of the appointed time (Gilgamesh XI 87, 90; the Harran inscriptions of Nabonidus). Kaufman's The Akkadian Influences on Aramaic (1974) supplies the loanword framework, correcting Zimmern's over-generous catalogue, and Bodi (2013) argues the direction of borrowing is Akkadian to Aramaic, against G. R. Driver's older reverse proposal, reading both terms as Semitic precursors of Greek kairos. The homophonous root behind Hebrew eden, delight and luxury, is kept distinct by careful treatments, and the older Strong's-style derivation from ed, witness, is a folk etymology of the reference tradition.

The live exegetical question is Daniel 7:25. Collins (Hermeneia), Montgomery (ICC), and Miller take the plural as a virtual dual, two times, so the phrase totals three and a half and, with the year value of Daniel 4, three and a half years, correlated with Daniel 12:7, 11-12, the divided week of Daniel 9:27, and Revelation's forty two months and 1,260 days; Collins ties the span to the Antiochene assault of roughly 167 to 164 BCE, and Segal (Vetus Testamentum 68 [2018]: 272-296) treats the figure as the baseline the later Danielic apocalypses recalculate. The grammatical difficulty is conceded by defenders: Biblical Aramaic has largely lost a productive dual (Rosenthal), so the ending is a plain masculine plural and two is an inference from the fraction rather than a morphological datum. Stefanovic analyses the phrase as a rising then broken count, a rhetorical figure for a period that seems to lengthen and is then cut short. In 7:12 the two Aramaic time-words stand side by side, most often read as a formulaic pairing for an appointed while rather than two measurable spans. Finally, because the word belongs to the common Aramaic word-stock, Kitchen's caution holds: Akkadian loanwords in Daniel have no real bearing on the book's date, and the linguistic question (Imperial Aramaic, on Kitchen's and Kutscher's account practically undatable within roughly 600 to 330 BCE) should be kept apart from the compositional one (final form in the 160s BCE on the critical consensus).