offshoots: the lesser branches of a family, the further relatives and dependents who hang on the head of a great house
This word appears once in the whole Bible, in Isaiah 22:24, and never again in Hebrew after it. Isaiah has just promised that Eliakim will be driven into place like a tent peg in a firm wall, and that the whole weight and honor of his father's house will be hung on him: the offspring (צֶאֱצָא) and these offshoots, right down to every small vessel, from the bowls to the jars. Because there is no second verse to compare, the sense has to be worked out from the company the word keeps.
The strongest clue is the word standing next to it. "Offspring" names those who come directly from a man, so this second word most likely names the further branches: the lesser relatives, the in-laws and hangers-on, everyone further out on the family tree who lives off the family name. Ancient and medieval readers took it that way. The Aramaic translation of Isaiah spoke of sons and grandsons, and Jewish commentators in the Middle Ages glossed the pair as "sons and daughters."
Scholars still read the word three ways:
- most take it as a second word for kin, the side branches of a household, lesser than the direct offspring named beside it;
- a smaller group hears contempt in it, the worthless growths a family throws off, so that the honor heaped on Eliakim is already a warning;
- others tie it to the vessels in the rest of the verse, reading it as a kind of pot or a swelling rather than a person, and some of them think the last two verses of the chapter were added later as a piece of irony.
The picture matters more than the label. Whatever exactly is hanging there, the next verse says the peg gives way and everything on it falls. Loading one man with a whole clan's weight is not a compliment: it is the setup for a crash. The same three letters also spell the Hebrew word for cattle dung (צָפִיעַ) and, in a longer form, a word for a viper (צִפְעוֹנִי). Older lexicons filed all of them under one idea of something pushed or squeezed out, while modern ones keep them apart as words that merely look alike.
Disputed
What the plural noun in Isaiah 22:24 actually names: a second class of relatives, a term of contempt for worthless growths, or something belonging with the vessels listed in the rest of the verse.
- majorityOffshoots, that is, a second word for kin, slightly lesser than the offspring named beside it. The sense is inferred from that parallel rather than from any secure derivation, and this is the reading behind the standard English versions.; BDB, s.v. צְפִיעָה ("dubious; apparently, from context, offshoot"); D. J. A. Clines (ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), vol. VII, s.v. צְפִיעָה; G. S. Ogden and J. Sterk, A Handbook on Isaiah (UBS Helps for Translators), on Isaiah 22:24
- minorityShoots of little value, named as if they were what a family excretes, so the word carries contempt for the lesser dependents even while the oracle piles honor on Eliakim.; W. Gesenius (trans. S. P. Tregelles), Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament, s.v. צְפִיעָה
- minorityA term belonging with the small vessels, bowls and jars of the second half of the verse rather than with people, a reading often joined to the view that Isaiah 22:24 and 22:25 are a later ironic supplement to the oracle. Held by some critical commentators on Isaiah without a settled lexical proposal behind it.