alal

This is the everyday Aramaic verb for going inside. Someone crosses a threshold and is now within: the queen walks into the hall where the feast is going on, and Daniel goes into his own house to pray at the open window.

Most of the time in Daniel, though, what is entered is not a building but a person's presence. The book is set in a royal court, where getting in front of the king happens at an appointed moment, and this is the word for that moment. Daniel goes in to ask for more time, the palace experts file in and stand before the throne, and Daniel comes in last of all when nobody else can read the writing. The formality belongs to the setting, not to the word. On its own it says only that someone went in.

Aramaic has other verbs for closing a distance, and they do not overlap with this one:

• אֲתָה is plain arrival, reaching a place from somewhere else.
• קְרֵב is drawing near to a person or thing without necessarily going inside anything.
• This word is the one that puts a person inside, past the door or in front of the throne.

Aramaic makes one verb do the work English splits between "come in" and "bring in." Reshaped slightly, the same word stops meaning that the subject goes in and starts meaning that the subject makes someone else go in. A king orders the wise men brought in, an officer hurries Daniel in, and later Daniel himself is brought in.

In practice this is the language of a royal summons. The person brought in does not pick the moment, the king does, and the word usually appears alongside the phrase for standing in front of him. Sometimes the sentence never names who did the bringing, and English then says simply that the person "was brought in."

The Hebrew verb בּוֹא works the same way, holding coming and bringing in one word. Greek splits the two as English does, using εἰσέρχομαι for going in and εἰσάγω for bringing someone in.