a rich person: someone who has an abundance of material goods, usually set opposite the poor
At its core the word simply names a person who has plenty. In itself it passes no judgment: rich and poor can stand side by side as a fair pair, the two halves of a society, and the word is at home describing a man with many flocks, a giver of gifts, or someone who cannot sleep for all he owns.
But the rich rarely stay neutral for long in the Hebrew Bible. In the wisdom books the word takes on a shadow. The rich man is courted for his money, answers the poor roughly, rules over those who owe him, and is quietly certain of his own cleverness. The sages do not call him wicked, yet they never let him rest comfortably in his wealth.
In the prophets the shadow hardens. There the rich are nearly the same people as the violent and the guilty: their houses are full of what they have seized, and "rich" stands almost in place of "wicked." The one word stretches this far because Israel's writers were less interested in defining wealth than in watching what it does to the people who hold it. The color it carries in any given verse comes from who is speaking, and against whom.
Nuances
How to read the word for a rich person in Isaiah 53:9, its single most contested occurrence. The line pairs the servant's burial place with the wicked and with a rich man in his death, and scholars divide over whether rich is a neutral social term in strange parallel with wicked, a textual corruption to be emended, or a genuine near-synonym of wicked drawn from prophetic usage. The great Isaiah scroll from Qumran supports the traditional consonants of the word itself and does not favor emending it.
- majorityKeep the received Hebrew text and read the word as a near-synonymous parallel to the wicked: the rich are the company the servant did not belong with, the term carrying the negative sense it bears elsewhere in the prophets. This is the emerging consensus.; Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Yale Bible 19A, 2002), 348-352; John Goldingay and David Payne, Isaiah 40-55 (International Critical Commentary, 2006); Shalom M. Paul, Isaiah 40-66 (Eerdmans Critical Commentary, 2012)
- minorityEmend the text to a word meaning evildoers so that the two lines are strictly parallel with the wicked, a conjecture reflected in some critical editions and modern versions.; Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, apparatus at Isaiah 53:9; BDB (1907), 799-800, reporting the conjectures of Boettcher, Krochmal, Graetz, and Cheyne
- minorityKeep the received text but hold that the word itself means wicked here, on a proposed cognate; this reading has not won broad assent.; Creighton Marlowe, The Wicked Wealthy in Isaiah 53:9, Asbury Journal (2009)