ro'eh

The word is built straight from the ordinary Hebrew verb "to see" (רָאָה), so it means simply "one who sees". Applied to a person it names a prophet, and it names him by what makes him worth going to: God shows him things other people cannot work out for themselves. In the one extended scene where the title is used in ordinary speech, Saul is out hunting lost donkeys and his servant proposes going to the seer, who turns out to be Samuel, and Samuel knows both where the animals are and that Saul is about to be made king.

That scene also contains the most discussed sentence in the word's history. The narrator breaks off to explain the term to his readers: in earlier days, when someone wanted to inquire of God, people said "let us go to the seer", because the man now called a prophet (נָבִיא) used to be called a seer. It is a rare thing for the Bible to comment on its own vocabulary, and this aside is the starting point for a long argument about whether a seer was once a different kind of figure from a prophet, or whether only the word changed.

The uses of the title fall into three settings:

• In 1 Samuel it is live speech, used by Saul's servant, by the young women at the well, by Saul himself, and by Samuel, who answers "I am the seer".
• In Chronicles it is a fixed designation attached to a name, Samuel the seer and Hanani the seer, men whose written records the historian says he is drawing on.
• In Isaiah the plural stands for prophets as a whole, quoted by people who order the seers to stop seeing and to say something pleasant instead.

Nothing in these settings marks the seer out as lesser than a prophet or as belonging only to the distant past. Chronicles, written centuries after Samuel, is happy to list "Samuel the seer" beside "Nathan the prophet" and Gad the visionary (חֹזֶה) in a single sentence, and the seer Hanani confronts a king to his face and is thrown in the stocks for it.

Once, in a single hard line, the word appears to name not the man who sees but the seeing itself. Isaiah pictures priest and prophet reeling with drink: they stagger "in vision" and they stumble in giving a ruling. The two halves of the line match the two offices, since seeing was the prophet's work and deciding cases was the priest's, and that pairing is the main reason most English versions and most standard Hebrew dictionaries take the word here as the vision rather than the visionary.

The reading is not certain. Nowhere else does the word mean anything but "seer", the wording is very compressed, and some read the line as saying that the drunkards stagger where the seer is concerned, or that the seer himself reels. Hebrew already had ordinary nouns for a prophetic vision (חָזוֹן is the common one), which is part of why a second word here has always looked surprising. This sense is listed because the standard dictionaries list it, not because it is beyond doubt.