fellow: a member of your own community, the peer who is bound to you by the same obligations
This is a rare word, twelve times in the whole Hebrew Bible, and it never stands on its own. It is always somebody's fellow: your fellow, his fellow, my fellow. It does not describe where a person lives or how well you know them. It marks a standing: this person and you belong to the same body of people and are held to the same rules.
Eleven of the twelve uses sit inside laws that spell out what members of that community owe one another, which is why the word keeps such consistent company:
- the person whose deposit you must not steal or lie about
- the person whose wife is off limits
- the person you must not cheat when land changes hands
- the person you must judge fairly whether he is poor or powerful
- the person you must correct honestly instead of quietly resenting
Hebrew has other words in this neighborhood, and the differences matter. There is a broad, everyday word for whoever you are dealing with (רֵעַ), which can stretch to a passing stranger or even a foreigner, and a family word that calls a fellow Israelite a brother (אָח). This word is narrower than either. It is formed from the word for the people themselves (עַם), and it says: one of us. The outsider who has settled among Israel (גֵּר) is protected by laws written separately, precisely because this particular word does not reach him.
The twelfth use breaks the pattern completely. In Zechariah, God speaks of the man who is "my fellow", using of a single human being a word that everywhere else describes two people standing side by side inside one community. Nothing else in the Hebrew Bible says anything like it. The claim the word makes is closeness and shared footing, not that the man is divine.
Nuances
Whom Zechariah 13:7 identifies as the shepherd whom YHWH calls gever amiti, the man who is my fellow. Since the noun elsewhere designates peer relations strictly within the human covenant community, its transposition onto the divine-human axis is without parallel in the Hebrew Bible, and the weight an interpreter gives it largely determines the identification. The ancient versions already diverged: the Septuagint rendered the phrase with politen mou, my fellow citizen, flattening the force into civic association, while the Vulgate chose virum cohaerentem mihi, the man cleaving to me, emphasizing union.
- majorityA royal, Davidic-type figure, since the intimacy the noun signals is otherwise reserved for the king's adoptive sonship language of Psalm 2:7 and 2 Samuel 7:14; Carol L. Meyers and Eric M. Meyers, Zechariah 9-14, Anchor Bible 25C (Doubleday, 1993), 384-386; Anthony R. Petterson, Behold Your King: The Hope for the House of David in the Book of Zechariah, LHBOTS 513 (T&T Clark, 2009), ch. 6; Al Wolters, Zechariah, Historical Commentary on the Old Testament (Peeters, 2014), ad loc.; Byron G. Curtis, Up the Steep and Stony Road: The Book of Zechariah in Social Location Trajectory Analysis, Academia Biblica 25 (SBL, 2006), 217
- minorityA failed leader struck in judgment rather than an exalted messianic figure; Paul L. Redditt, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, New Century Bible (Eerdmans, 1995), ad loc.
- minorityA signal of the termination of the Davidic line in Persian-period disillusionment, not its culmination, which is why Zechariah 14 never returns to the figure; Mark J. Boda, The Book of Zechariah, NICOT (Eerdmans, 2016), 738-749
- minorityThe figure should not be identified at all; the pericope is a stylized reflection on a crisis of community leadership; David L. Petersen, Zechariah 9-14 and Malachi, Old Testament Library (Westminster John Knox, 1995), 129-133
Disputed
Whether amit is a technical designation of the Holiness Code for a fellow Israelite considered as a covenant peer, or effectively a stylistic variant of rea, neighbor, with no distinct sociological force. The distribution is what drives the majority case: the noun occurs only twelve times, always with a pronominal suffix, and almost exclusively inside the legal-ethical stipulations of Leviticus and the Holiness School redactional layers, where H repeatedly prefers it to rea.
- majorityA specialized term of the Holiness Code marking communal peer-status under the shared covenant, deliberately chosen over the broader rea; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, Anchor Bible 3A (Doubleday, 2000), 1646-1656; John E. Hartley, Leviticus, Word Biblical Commentary 4 (Word, 1992), 309-315; Jan Joosten, People and Land in the Holiness Code, VTSup 67 (Brill, 1996), 79-92; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 126-127
- minorityA virtual synonym of rea, with the variation treated as stylistic rather than sociological; Karl Elliger, Leviticus, Handbuch zum Alten Testament 4 (Mohr Siebeck, 1966), ad loc.; Martin Noth, Leviticus, Old Testament Library, ET (SCM, 1965), ad loc.
- minorityA peer or counterpart, one standing over against another, derived without narrowing the referent to an Israelite; Rashbam and Ibn Ezra on Leviticus 19, as summarized in John J. Collins, What Are Biblical Values? What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues (Yale University Press, 2019)