panin

The word occurs six times, always in the plural, only in poetry, and always in a comparison where wisdom, virtue, or noble youths outrank a prized substance. Since Michaelis (Supplementa, 1784-92) proposed a link to Arabic fanan, meaning a branch or twig, the major lexica have converged on red coral (Corallium rubrum), whose branching form matches the cognate: so HALOT, Gesenius (18th ed.), BDB (which makes corals the headword gloss with pearls secondary), NIDOTTE, and TDOT. The decisive internal datum is Lamentations 4:7, where the verb translated "they were red" describes the Nazirites as red or ruddy, which fits a red substance and tells against white pearls. Comparative work supplies notable negative evidence: neither Mankowski (Akkadian Loanwords, 2000) nor Noonan (Non-Semitic Loanwords, 2019) lists the word, and no firm Ugaritic, Aramaic, or Syriac cognate survives, so it looks like a native West Semitic formation. The older reading, pearls, descends from medieval Jewish exegesis (Rashi, Ibn Ezra) through Bochart's Hierozoicon (1663) and is still defended by several Job commentators (Dhorme, Gordis, Habel, Hartley), largely on the Job 28:18 parallelism with ramoth and gabish, which are themselves prized items and so, on their reading, should each name a distinct substance. Clines (WBC) reverses that logic, reading the word as coral and reassigning ramoth. DCH, by editorial policy, excludes cognate data and gives only the agnostic "pearls, corals, rubies"; Fox, Longman, and Murphy likewise prefer a generic "jewels", which is essentially the strategy of the Septuagint, whose translators rendered it with the stock phrase "costly stones" in Proverbs and did not recognize it as a specific term in Job. The KJV rubies has no philological support and has effectively disappeared from critical scholarship. A textual variant sits at Proverbs 3:15 (written mippeniyyim, read mippeninim); the sometimes-alleged variant at Lamentations 4:7 does not in fact exist. The singular is unattested as a common noun and survives only as the personal name Peninnah in 1 Samuel 1:2.