a donkey colt: the young male of the donkey, ridden as a mount and counted as valuable stock
This is the Hebrew word for a donkey's young: the colt or foal, and specifically a male one. Hebrew keeps three animals apart with three words, the ordinary grown donkey (חֲמוֹר), the female or she-ass (אָתוֹן), and this one for the youngster. It appears only eight times, but those eight uses land in some of the most memorable lines in the Hebrew Bible.
The eight verses between them show most of the work a donkey colt actually did:
- the sons of Israel's local chieftains rode them as a mark of standing, thirty colts for the sons of Jair and seventy for the family of Abdon
- envoys loaded them with treasure and drove them south through snake country to buy help from Egypt
- farmers worked them on the land beside the oxen and fed them good seasoned fodder
- herdsmen counted them among a household's breeding stock, ten of them in the peace offering Jacob sent ahead to Esau
The best known verse is Zechariah 9:9, where Jerusalem's coming king arrives "lowly, and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a she-ass." The animal is the whole point: a king who rides a working donkey rather than a war horse is announcing that he comes in peace. The Gospel writers take up that picture for Jesus entering Jerusalem, reaching either for the Greek word for a colt (πῶλος) or for a fond diminutive meaning "little donkey" (ὀνάριον).
One use stands apart from the rest. Job 11:12 sets this word beside the word for the untamed desert donkey (פֶּרֶא) in a blunt proverb about a man with nothing between his ears, who will come to his senses roughly when a wild donkey's colt is born human. The colt there is nobody's property, and the comparison is not meant kindly.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the noun marks the animal's youth (a colt or foal) or simply its sex (a male donkey of any age).
- majorityIt names a young donkey, a colt or foal, with the age belonging to the word itself; the pairing with the she-ass as its mother in Genesis 49:11 and Zechariah 9:9 supports this, and it is the reading behind nearly every English version.; HALOT, s.v. עַיִר; DCH, s.v. עַיִר
- minorityIt names the male donkey as such, with youth inferred from context rather than encoded in the noun.; BDB, s.v. עַיִר