she'er

At its center this word means flesh in the plainest physical sense: the soft meat of a body. Scripture uses it two ways.

First, flesh as food, the meat set before someone or torn from them. The wilderness generation doubts that God can spread a table of meat in the desert, and Micah pictures corrupt leaders devouring the very flesh of the people they should be protecting.

Second, one's own flesh, the body itself. It is what wastes away in old age, collapses under grief, or fails at death, set over against the inner strength a person still has when the body gives out.

What ties the two shades together is that this is the perishable, tangible stuff a creature is made of, the part that can be eaten or worn out, as distinct from the inner life.

From flesh comes a second, quite different meaning: a blood relative. The thought is that close family members share the same flesh, so the word for flesh becomes a word for kin, much as English speaks of one's own "flesh and blood."

This sense is at home in two settings. In the laws of Leviticus that forbid sexual relations within the family, it marks the circle of people too closely related to marry. In the inheritance rules of Numbers, it identifies the nearest surviving relative who receives an estate when there is no direct heir.

Hebrew often reinforces it by pairing this word with בָּשָׂר, another word for flesh, in the phrase "flesh of his flesh" to mean a true blood relation. What the word carries here is not the body as substance but the bond of shared blood.