StrongerBible

patbag

פַּת־בָּג

HebrewH6598“delicacies, rations, ...”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Dan 1:5 (2×)Dan 1:8Dan 1:13Dan 1:15Dan 1:16Dan 11:26 (2×)
Word studyResearch-gradepaht-BAHGnoun

What patbag means

the king's ration: the daily allotment of fine food and wine handed out from the royal table

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This word is not really Hebrew at all. It is a Persian loanword, brought into the Bible to name a very specific thing: the food a king assigned, day by day, to people in his service. It does not mean food in general, and it does not mean a single meal. It means a standing provision, a portion that marked you as someone the king was feeding and, by extension, someone the king owned.

It appears only in the book of Daniel, and always with that flavor of royal patronage. In the opening story it is the rich food and wine set aside for the young Judean trainees in Nebuchadnezzar's court, the very thing Daniel resolves not to take. Late in the book the same word turns on its head: the people who eat a king's ration are the very intimates who destroy him. The shared idea across both is the table of a powerful ruler, where being fed is a sign of loyalty owed.

Because it names a foreign institution, the word also carries a subtle charge of strangeness. Bringing in a Persian term for the king's food quietly marks that food as belonging to someone else's world, outside the boundaries of Israel's own life. That is part of why Daniel's refusal of it reads as more than a diet choice.

Dan 1:5 (2×)Dan 1:8Dan 1:13Dan 1:15Dan 1:16Dan 11:26 (2×)

Disputed

Why Daniel refuses the king's ration in Daniel 1: which concern the refusal expresses.

  • majorityIt is chiefly a symbolic act of loyalty and identity, a refusal to accept dependence on the king's patronage rather than on God. The older purely dietary explanation is weak because the ration also included wine and vegetables, which no dietary law forbids.; John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1993), pp. 141ff.; Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, AB 23 (Doubleday, 1978), pp. 127, 133; John E. Goldingay, Daniel, WBC 30 (Word, 1989), ad Dan 1:8; Carol A. Newsom, Daniel: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 2014), pp. 36ff.
  • minorityThe refusal is driven by Jewish dietary and purity concerns together with rejection of food tied to pagan ritual, and the authentic Persian setting supports an early date for the story.; Andrew E. Steinmann, Daniel, Concordia Commentary (Concordia, 2008), ad loc.

What scholars say about patbag

There is broad modern consensus, set out by Noonan (Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, 2019) and Tavernier (Iranica in the Achaemenid Period, 2007), that the word is the Old Persian *patibaga- ("allotted portion, royal allowance of food"), and that the Masoretic division into pat ("morsel") plus bag is a secondary folk etymology, parallel to *patigama- becoming pithgam ("decree"). The lexica agree on the gloss: BDB ("portion of food for the king, delicacies"), HALOT, DCH, and Gesenius-Buhl ("royal table-fare"). The cleanest external witness is the Greek potibazis, cited by Athenaeus from Dinon of Colophon for a special bread of the Persian royal table, alongside the Syriac cognate patbaga in the Peshitta of Daniel. The institution behind the term, the Achaemenid royal table that fed dependents daily, is documented in the Persepolis Fortification Tablets (Hallock, 1969; Henkelman, 2010) and in the Greek historians. Commentators including Collins (Hermeneia), Hartman and Di Lella (Anchor Bible), Goldingay (WBC), and Newsom (OTL) read the word's two halves of Daniel as a deliberate bracket: the youths who refuse the king's ration in chapter 1 and the courtiers whose shared ration destroys their king in chapter 11.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), p. 834, s.v. פַּתְבָּגlexicon
  • Koehler-Baumgartner, HALOT, trans. Richardson (Brill, 1994-2000), vol. 3, p. 990lexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 6 (2007), s.v. פַּתְבָּגlexicon
  • Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, LSAWS 14 (Eisenbrauns, 2019), s.v. פתבגmonograph
  • Jan Tavernier, Iranica in the Achaemenid Period, OLA 158 (Peeters, 2007), pp. 410ff.monograph
  • John J. Collins, Daniel, Hermeneia (Fortress, 1993), pp. 141ff., 384-85commentary
  • Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, AB 23 (Doubleday, 1978), pp. 127, 133commentary
  • John E. Goldingay, Daniel, WBC 30 (Word, 1989), ad Dan 1:8commentary
  • Carol A. Newsom, Daniel: A Commentary, OTL (Westminster John Knox, 2014), pp. 36ff., 47-48commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of פַּת־בָּג

m s construct

פַּתְבַּג, פַּת, בַּג

Dan 1:8, Dan 1:13, Dan 1:15, Dan 1:5, Dan 11:26, Dan 1:5

m s construct

פַּתְבָּגָם

Dan 1:16

m s construct

בָּגוֹ

Dan 11:26