rav

Biblical Aramaic reaches for this one word whenever something stands out from what surrounds it by sheer scale. In the dream and vision reports of Daniel it measures bulk: the statue towering in front of the king, the mountain that the fallen stone grows into, the sea churned up by the four winds. In Ezra and in the court scenes it measures standing instead, naming a king who ranks above other kings, or naming God.

These are not two ideas so much as one. To call something great is to say it is built on a larger scale than whatever stands beside it, and a person's scale is his rank. So the word can describe a mountain in one verse and a Persian king in the next with no sense of a stretch. Where a writer wants quantity rather than scale, he uses a different Aramaic word for "much" or "many" (שַׂגִּיא).

Two verses carry the phrase "the great God": a Persian governor's report about the temple going up in Jerusalem (Ezra 5:8), and Daniel's own word to a king who has just watched his empire crumble in a dream (Daniel 2:45).

The word is never plural in these books. When several things are called great at once, that work goes to a related Aramaic word (רַבְרַב), which also supplies the phrase for the boastful speech of the last horn in Daniel's vision.

In four places the word stops describing something and becomes a job title. Aramaic sets it directly in front of the name of the group a man heads, so the title reads as "chief of" that group: the king's bodyguard in Daniel 2:14, the officials set over Babylon's wise men in Daniel 2:48, and the court's magicians and diviners in Daniel 4:9 and 5:11.

The pattern is borrowed from the way the empires of the day named their officers, where the head of any department of state was simply called its great one. English cannot follow the Aramaic here, since "great of the bodyguard" is not English, so translators supply a rank word instead: "chief", "captain", and "master" all stand for this one word.

Two of the four titles are Daniel's own. He is made head over Babylon's wise men on the day he interprets the dream, and years later the queen still remembers Nebuchadnezzar putting him over the magicians and diviners. The Hebrew word spelled the same way (רַב) builds court titles in exactly this manner, including the captain of the guard who burns Jerusalem.