StrongerBible

shaga

שָׁגַע

HebrewH7696“mad, madman, ...”

Appears 7 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Deu 28:341Sa 21:14(15)1Sa 21:15(16) (2×)2Ki 9:11Jer 29:26Hos 9:7
Root family
Word studyshah-GAHverb

What shaga means

to be out of one's right mind, or to act like it: madness that shows itself in how a person behaves.

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is a word about madness other people can see. It never describes a private mood or a quiet inner state. It describes someone whose behavior has come apart in the open, so that anyone watching says "that man is out of his mind." Every one of its seven appearances is somebody's verdict on how another person is acting.

It turns up in three settings:

  • as a curse, when Deuteronomy warns that a nation crushed by disaster will be driven out of its mind by what it is forced to watch;
  • as an insult, when royal officers, a hostile priest, and a jeering crowd all call a prophet a madman;
  • as a disguise, when David escapes the king of Gath by scratching at the city gate and letting spit run down into his beard.

The insult is the striking part. Three of the six verses that use the word aim it at prophets, which says something about how prophecy looked from the outside: the trances, the shouting, the strange acted-out signs. The Bible reports the sneer without agreeing with it. In 2 Kings the "madman" being mocked has just anointed the next king of Israel, and everything he said comes true.

Two nearby words help fix its edges. A fool (אֱוִיל) is someone whose judgment and choices are bad, and Hosea sets that word right beside this one; this word is not about bad judgment at all, but about a mind that has stopped working. A broader verb (הָלַל) covers raving and reeling of many kinds, and it is the one the narrator picks for David's act in 1 Samuel 21:13, while the king of Gath reaches for this word instead. The matching noun (שִׁגָּעוֹן) names madness as a condition rather than naming the person who has it.

Nuances

1agenuinely out of one's mind: a person whose reason has given way.
TranslatabilityDirect
Deu 28:341Sa 21:15(16) (2×)
1b"madman": a contemptuous name for a prophet, aimed at someone whose behavior looked unhinged.
2Ki 9:11Jer 29:26Hos 9:7
1cto act the madman: to put on the behavior of someone out of his mind.
1Sa 21:14(15)1Sa 21:15(16) (2×)

What scholars say about shaga

The verb is attested only in the pual and the hithpael, seven times across six verses; no qal is attested in Biblical Hebrew, and the abstract noun שִׁגָּעוֹן supplies the nominal member of the root. HALOT, BDB, and DCH agree on the sense "to be mad, insane," with the pual participle regularly functioning substantivally as "madman." Comparative material is usually drawn from Akkadian šegû, used of raging and of rabid animals, together with cognates in later Aramaic and Syriac in the same semantic field. The ancient Greek versions do not settle on one equivalent, using several different words for derangement across the six verses, which is itself evidence that the field was understood broadly. The three prophetic occurrences (2 Kings 9:11; Jeremiah 29:26; Hosea 9:7) are regularly treated together in work on prophetic ecstasy and the social location of prophets, notably Wilson, where the term is read as an outsider's designation for intermediary behavior. The exegetical crux at Hosea 9:7 is whether the clause quotes popular mockery of the prophet or states the prophet's own indictment of others; the major commentaries divide on it (Wolff; Macintosh). At 1 Samuel 21:14-15 (English versification) the narrator's verb for David's performance is הלל while Achish's speech uses שגע, a shift noted by McCarter.

Sources

  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. שׁגעlexicon
  • BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. שׁגעlexicon
  • DCH (Clines, ed.), s.v. שׁגעlexicon
  • P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel, Anchor Bible (1980)commentary
  • Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings, Anchor Bible (1988)commentary
  • Jack R. Lundbom, Jeremiah 21-36, Anchor Bible (2004)commentary
  • Hans Walter Wolff, Hosea, Hermeneia (1974)commentary
  • A. A. Macintosh, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Hosea, ICC (1997)commentary
  • Robert R. Wilson, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel (1980)monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of שָׁגַע

pual passive-participle m s absolute

מְשֻׁגָּע

Deu 28:34, 2Ki 9:11, Jer 29:26, Hos 9:7

hithpael infinitive-construct construct

הִשְׁתַּגֵּעַ

1Sa 21:15

hithpael participle m s absolute

מִשְׁתַּגֵּעַ

1Sa 21:14

pual passive-participle m p absolute

מְשֻׁגָּעִים

1Sa 21:15