a roar: the deep, carrying cry of a lion, and the same raw sound forced out of a person in pain.
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
This is a lion word first. Four of its seven uses sit inside pictures of lions:
a lion whose roar is silenced when God breaks its teeth (Job 4:10)
young lions roaring over the ruined thickets along the Jordan (Zechariah 11:3)
an invading army whose noise is like a lion's (Isaiah 5:29)
a prince of Judah, drawn as a man-eating lion, whose roar empties the land (Ezekiel 19:7)
The sound is not merely loud. It belongs to something that hunts, and hearing it means you have already been found.
The other three uses put that same sound in a suffering person's mouth. Job says his roarings pour out like water, a psalmist says his bones wore out with his roaring all day long, and Psalm 22 calls its opening cry of abandonment "the words of my roaring". Hebrew had quieter options: a sigh (אֲנָחָה) or a cry for help addressed to someone who can act (צְעָקָה). Reaching for the lion word instead says the pain came out as something nearer to an animal noise than to speech.
Those two uses are one word because the Bible hears one sound in them, not because the picture has faded. Notice also what is missing: the matching verb meaning "to roar" (שָׁאַג) can describe God himself roaring from Zion (Amos 1:2), but this noun never does. The roar it names belongs to predators and to people at the end of their strength.
Nuances
1athe roar of a lion: the sound a predator makes over its hunting ground.
TranslatabilityDirect
Job 4:10Isa 5:29*Ezk 19:7*Zec 11:3
1ba person's roar of pain: the loud, wordless cry of someone in anguish.
The ordinary word for a lion's roar, the full-throated sound a hunting animal makes over the prey it has taken.Job 4:10Isa 5:29Zec 11:3
Names a noise measured by how far it carries. In Ezekiel 19:7 a whole land and everything in it is left desolate at the sound of one lion's roaring, which is a public sound heard at a distance rather than a private one.Ezk 19:7
Used of a person whose pain comes out at full volume, loud enough to carry actual words and to keep going all day long.Psa 22:1Psa 32:3
Both
Both name a deep, threatening noise that rolls over the people who hear it. Isaiah describes the same invading army with each word in back to back lines, first roaring like a lion and then growling like the sea.Isa 5:29Isa 5:30
Both are used of a human being in distress and not only of animals or of the sea, so either can stand for the sound that grief makes when words fail.Psa 38:8Job 3:24
Used for the noise of something that has no throat at all. In Isaiah 5:30 the sound closing over the land as the light goes dark is the sea, rendered "the roaring of the sea", a low unbroken rumble rather than a cry from a living voice.Isa 5:30
Places the sound inside a person rather than out in the open. In Psalm 38:8 the moaning is located in the heart, and the sufferer's louder outcry is described as breaking out of it, so this word is the ache underneath the shout and not the shout itself.Psa 38:8
אֲנָחָהa sigh, breathed out quietly, where this word is loud enough to carry across a field.
First and mostly it is the noise a lion makes over its kill. When people make this sound in the text it is because they are being pictured as lions, whether that is an invading army or the ruined rulers of a land.Job 4:10Isa 5:29Zec 11:3
It travels, and the travelling is what does the damage. A whole land and everything in it is left empty by nothing more than the sound of it reaching people who are nowhere near the animal.Ezk 19:7Isa 5:29
When a person makes this sound it can carry actual words, so it works as a shout flung at God and expecting an answer back rather than a breath escaping on its own.Psa 22:1
Both
Job sets the two side by side in one line, which is the clearest picture of how they relate: the quiet one arrives before he can eat, and the loud one pours out of him like water. Both are simply what his suffering sounds like coming out of one man.Job 3:24
Both are sounds that wear the body down. One man's bones stick to his skin from the sound of the first, and another's bones waste away from keeping up the second all day long.Psa 102:5Psa 32:3
Both get turned toward God in prayer and offered as evidence of how bad things have become, so English Bibles can render either one "groaning" without doing violence to the sense.Psa 38:9Psa 22:1
This is the sound of someone with no strength left. It keeps company with weariness, sleepless nights soaking a bed with tears, and years that have simply run out, never with any show of force.Psa 6:6Psa 31:10Jer 45:3
It can name a whole settled condition of misery rather than a single noise, so it stands in lists beside "sorrow" as one of the things God promises to bring to an end.Isa 35:10Isa 51:11Isa 21:2
It is quiet enough to go unnoticed by everyone else, which is exactly the point when a sufferer tells God that this sound is not hidden from him and asks him to look at how many such breaths there have been.Psa 38:9Lam 1:22
It belongs to a person weighed down and pressing back, the heaviness of a hand felt on top of a complaint that will not stop coming out.Job 23:2
צְעָקָהa cry for help aimed at someone who can do something about it; this word names the raw noise, whether or not anyone is listening.
Its home is the roar of a lion, the noise a predator makes. Job pairs it with the growl of the young lions, and Isaiah uses it for an invading army that sounds like one closing on prey with nobody able to pull the prey free.Job 4:10Isa 5:29
Used of a person, it names the raw noise that pain forces out, and nothing in the word implies anyone is listening. The psalmist says God is far off from the sound of it, and another says he made this noise all day long during the very stretch when he was keeping his mouth shut about his guilt, so it is a sound with no addressee at all.Psa 22:1Psa 32:3Job 3:24
It can be a sound that terrifies rather than one that asks for anything. Ezekiel says a whole land and everything in it was left empty at the noise of the lion prince's roaring, so the effect of the sound is dread, not rescue.Ezk 19:7
Both
Both belong to the prophets' pictures of powerful men losing everything. Jeremiah hears the shepherds' cry when their pasture is stripped, and Zechariah sets the roar of the young lions beside the wailing of the shepherds when the thickets of the Jordan are ruined.Jer 25:36Zec 11:3
Either word can name a sound loud enough to travel across a whole region and tell everyone within reach that something terrible has happened.Jer 48:5Jer 49:21Ezk 19:7
Both are sounds wrung out by real suffering rather than composed speech, which is why English Bibles reach for overlapping words for them, rendering one "outcry" or "cry" and the other "roaring" or "groaning".Exo 12:30Gen 27:34Job 3:24Psa 32:3
This is the cry of people who have been wronged, and it goes up to someone with the power to do something about it. God says the outcry of Sodom has reached him, he hears Israel calling out from under its slave drivers, and he says the same of the poor and the afflicted. Nehemiah's neighbors raise it against their own countrymen who are squeezing them.Gen 18:21Gen 19:13Exo 3:7Exo 3:9Exo 22:231Sa 9:16Neh 5:1Job 34:28Psa 9:12
Because it is aimed at a hearer, the open question about it is whether that hearer will answer. Job's friend asks straight out whether God will listen to such a cry when trouble closes in, which is a question you can only ask about a sound that was sent to someone.Job 27:9
It can be a plea to one particular person who is able to grant what is being asked. Esau lets out a bitter cry the moment he learns the blessing is gone, and the cry is addressed to his father, with the request following in the same breath.Gen 27:34
It also names the public alarm that spreads through a town or a whole country when disaster lands, a noise that carries the news and pulls everyone in earshot into it. Egypt raises it the night the firstborn die, Eli catches the sound of it and asks what the uproar means, and the prophets hear it running from one city gate to the next.Exo 11:6Exo 12:301Sa 4:14Jer 48:3Zep 1:10
Isaiah makes it the evidence that a society has gone wrong. God looked for justice and got the sound of people crying out instead, so the word stands as proof that someone is being harmed and is calling for it to stop.Isa 5:7
she'agah in the other biblical languages
ὠρύομαιGreek“to roar”the Greek word for roaring like a lion, used of the devil prowling in 1 Peter 5:8; it is the action, while the Hebrew word is the sound.
The Hebrew word also covers a person's roar of pain, which the Greek word never does. Job's cries pour out like water, one psalm calls a prayer "the words of my roaring", and another says the writer's bones wore out from roaring all day long. In each case a suffering human being is making a sound the size of an animal's.Job 3:24Psa 22:1Psa 32:3
It names the sound itself as a thing that can be pointed to, carried across a distance, and counted in a list of noises. A whole land is left empty at the sound of one roaring, and a lament is built by stacking one cry on another, the wailing of shepherds and then the roaring of young lions.Ezk 19:7Zec 11:3
Because it is the sound as an object, it can be taken away. Job sets the lion's roaring beside teeth that get broken, so the noise stands for a strength that God can end, and Zechariah turns the same roaring into a sound of loss over ruined country.Job 4:10Zec 11:3
Both
Both belong to the same picture: the deep carrying sound a lion makes, which tells everyone within earshot that a large predator is near. Isaiah says an invading army will have a roaring like a lion, and Peter pictures the devil as a roaring lion.Isa 5:29Zec 11:31Pe 5:8
In both, the roaring goes together with hunting. The Hebrew roaring belongs to a lion that seizes its prey and carries it off with no one to rescue it, and the Greek roaring belongs to a lion on the prowl seeking someone to swallow.Isa 5:291Pe 5:8
The Greek word puts the roaring in motion as something the creature is doing. In its one New Testament use the enemy is a lion roaring while he walks about looking for someone to swallow, so the sound is part of the hunt in progress rather than a noise anyone stops to describe.1Pe 5:8
Its only use is a warning meant to change the reader's behavior. The roaring is not reported as something that once happened; it is held up so that readers stay sober and keep watch against an enemy they cannot see.1Pe 5:8
What scholars say about she'agah
The noun שְׁאָגָה occurs 7 times, formed from the root שאג. HALOT, BDB, and DCH all treat it as a single lexeme with one sense, "roaring," primarily leonine (Job 4:10;Isa 5:29;Ezek 19:7;Zech 11:3) and secondarily transferred to human lament (Job 3:24;Ps 22:2 [Eng. 22:1]; 32:3). The lexica do not posit homonymy, and the transfer is treated as metaphorical extension rather than a distinct root, a judgment TDOT follows in its treatment of שָׁאַג. Isa 5:29 is the boundary case: the referent is the invading nation, but the simile (כַּלָּבִיא) and the surrounding lion vocabulary (לָבִיא, כְּפִיר, נָהַם, טֶרֶף) keep it within the leonine field, and it is so classified in the standard lexica. Ezek 19:7 sits within the sustained lion allegory of the qinah over Israel's princes. In Ps 22:2 the construct phrase דִּבְרֵי שַׁאֲגָתִי is syntactically awkward and has attracted emendation proposals in the commentary tradition, but the noun's sense is not in question; Kraus retains the Masoretic text. Clines notes on Job 3:24 the pairing with אֲנָחָה, which sets a quiet sigh against a roar in the same breath. Notably, while the cognate verb takes YHWH as subject in the prophetic theophany formula (Amos 1:2; Joel 4:16 [Eng. 3:16]), the noun never does.
Sources
HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. שאגהlexicon
BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. שאגהlexicon
DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. שאגהlexicon
Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT), s.v. שאגdictionary
David J. A. Clines, Job 1-20, Word Biblical Commentary 17 (1989)commentary
Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59: A Continental Commentary (1993)commentary