StrongerBible

shiryon

שִׁרְיוֹן

HebrewH8302“coat of mail, armor, ...”

Appears 9 times · tap a cell to see the verses

1Sa 17:5 (2×)1Sa 17:381Ki 22:342Ch 18:332Ch 26:14Neh 4:16(10)Job 41:26(18)Isa 59:17
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradesheer-YOHNnoun

What shiryon means

a coat of scale armor: a shirt faced with rows of small overlapping metal or leather plates, worn to protect the body in battle

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

A shiryon was not a sheet of metal but a garment. Rows of small plates, called scales, were sewn onto a backing of leather or heavy cloth so that each row overlapped the one below it. The result bent with the body like a shirt while still turning a blade or an arrow. Coats like this, and loose scales from them, have been dug up all across the ancient Near East, and one made of leather survived in Tutankhamun's tomb, built from layers of linen faced with more than four thousand rawhide scales.

The word almost certainly came into Hebrew from somewhere else. Nearly identical words for the same coat turn up in Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Egyptian records, spreading through the region along with chariot warfare, and the odd ending on the Babylonian form is the giveaway that it was not homegrown there either. Scholars still argue over which language it started in, but they agree Hebrew borrowed it rather than built it from a root of its own.

Every occurrence names the same object, and the uses run from hardware to poetry:

  • Goliath wears one of bronze scales, and Saul lends his own coat to David.
  • An arrow slips through a seam in Ahab's coat and kills him in his chariot.
  • Uzziah stocks a whole army with them, and Nehemiah's guards keep them at hand.
  • The Lord puts righteousness on like one, matched with a helmet (כּוֹבַע) of salvation.

That last picture had a long afterlife. Greek translators regularly reached for their own word for a breastplate (θώραξ) to render this coat, and Isaiah's line about righteousness worn as armor comes through in the New Testament as the breastplate of righteousness.

Nuances

1athe plated coat a fighter wears or is issued for battle
1Sa 17:5 (2×)1Sa 17:381Ki 22:342Ch 18:332Ch 26:14Neh 4:16(10)Jer 46:4Jer 51:3
1bbody armor as the picture of a protective covering someone puts on
Isa 59:17
1cbody armor named among the war gear that cannot pierce the great sea creature of Job
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested
Job 41:26(18)
Job 41:26

Whether the word at this verse means body armor, as everywhere else, or a thrown weapon such as a lance or javelin.

  • contestedBody armor, the same word as elsewhere; the ancient Greek translators rendered it with their word for a breastplate.; Septuagint, Job 41:26 (θώρακα)
  • contestedA missile weapon, a lance or javelin, since the verse lists it alongside sword, spear, and dart.; Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. שִׁרְיָה (p. 1056)
Variants

The same word in another spelling or form.

סִרְיֹן“armor”The word סִרְיֹן (siryon) is the same word as שִׁרְיוֹן (shiryon), the Hebrew name for a coat of scale armor, written with a slightly different first letter. The shift in that opening sound is a feature of later Hebrew, and it shows up only in the book of Jeremiah, where soldiers are told to put on their coats of mail. Nothing in its meaning sets it apart from shiryon, so the fuller study of shiryon covers this spelling too.

What scholars say about shiryon

The lexica agree on the sense and diverge on the etymology. BDB files the noun under a hypothetical root IV שׁרה that it labels "meaning dubious," then immediately compares Assyrian siriyâm and Egyptian forms; HALOT lists širyôn / širyān, notes the samek byform siryôn in Jeremiah, and treats the whole group comparatively; DCH gives "body armour, coat of mail, scale-armour" and, being corpus-based, registers the Ben Sira attestation at Sirach 43:20; Gesenius (18th ed., Donner) glosses "Panzer, Brustharnisch." There is no dedicated TDOT article, and the current specialist treatment is Noonan's loanword lexicon. The comparative dossier is Akkadian siriam / sariam / širiam ("leather coat reinforced with metal pieces," densely attested in the Nuzi archives studied by Lacheman and Kendall), Ugaritic ṯryn in lbš ṯryn (KTU 4.17:15, so Watson with Ribichini, Xella, and Vita), Egyptian syllabic writings discussed by Hoch and Muchiki, plus Aramaic and Syriac cognates and Late Hebrew continuations. Noonan argues for a Hurrian culture-word carried on the Late Bronze chariot-warfare wave, following Speiser's framework; de Ridder's review counters that no Hurrian etymology can be demonstrated (citing Richter's Bibliographisches Glossar des Hurritischen) and that the -am suffix on Akkadian si/ariyam may instead point to Kassite (Sassmannshausen). The ancient versions map the word onto θώραξ and lorica with unusual consistency, which is what allows Isaiah 59:17 to feed Wisdom of Solomon 5:18 and then Ephesians 6:14 and 1 Thessalonians 5:8, an Isaianic backdrop noted by Neufeld and Thielman. On Goliath's panoply the field is a spectrum rather than a consensus: Yigael Yadin read the description as a prime record of Philistine armament; Galling judged the assemblage eclectic and un-Philistine, the scale coat Mesopotamian and Syrian in type; Azzan Yadin read the scene as a sixth to fifth century engagement with Homeric epic, complete with single combat and an arming type-scene; Finkelstein argued for late-monarchic realia; and McCarter, Klein, and Tsumura weigh these against the textual complexity of 1 Samuel 17 (the shorter Old Greek against the longer Masoretic text, on which Tov has written). The archaeology of scale armor from Nuzi, Alalakh, Megiddo, Hazor, Lachish, and Beth-Shean, from Egypt, and from the Assyrian reliefs, surveyed by Yadin, Kendall, and Dezső, confirms the object was real and widespread, while the 5,000-shekel weight given Goliath, roughly 58 kg, reads as epic hyperbole against attested coats of some 15 to 25 kg. At 1 Kings 22:34 the phrase "between the dĕbāqîm and the širyān" is genuinely obscure; the root sense "cling, join" favors the point where parts of the coat overlap or lace together, so that the arrow found a seam. Finally, the proper noun Sirion, the Sidonian name for Mount Hermon, is best treated as an ancient Northwest Semitic toponym homographic with this word rather than derived from it: Ugaritic šryn stands in exact parallel to Lebanon in the Baal Cycle, the same pairing as Psalm 29:6, and Akkadian and Egyptian texts attest the mountain name independently. Gesenius's "breastplate mountain" identification is attractive but unprovable.

Where scholars disagree about shiryon

Which language Hebrew borrowed the word from. Specialists agree it is a foreign loan rather than a native Hebrew formation, but the donor language is unsettled.

  • contestedA Hurrian culture-word that spread into Akkadian, Ugaritic, Egyptian, and Hebrew along with Late Bronze chariot warfare.; Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact (2019), 213-214; E. A. Speiser, Introduction to Hurrian (1941)
  • contestedA foreign word whose source cannot be determined, since no Hurrian etymology can be shown; the ending on the Akkadian form may instead point to Kassite.; Jacob Jan de Ridder, review of Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, Journal of Semitic Studies 66, no. 1 (2021): e10-e15, esp. e15; Thomas Richter, Bibliographisches Glossar des Hurritischen (2012), 357-359; L. Sassmannshausen, "Kassite Nomads: Fact or Fiction?" Amurru 3 (2004), 290 n. 23
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • Brown, Driver & Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. שׁרה IV / שִׁרְיוֹן (p. 1056)lexicon
  • Koehler & Baumgartner, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), s.v. שִׁרְיוֹן / שִׁרְיָןlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew (DCH), s.v. שִׁרְיוֹןlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18th ed., ed. Herbert Donner, s.v. שִׁרְיוֹןlexicon
  • Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible: A Lexicon of Language Contact (University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2019), 213-214monograph
  • Jacob Jan de Ridder, review of Benjamin J. Noonan, Non-Semitic Loanwords in the Hebrew Bible, Journal of Semitic Studies 66, no. 1 (2021): e10-e15article
  • Thomas Richter, Bibliographisches Glossar des Hurritischen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012), 357-359reference
  • E. A. Speiser, Introduction to Hurrian (New Haven: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1941)monograph
  • The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (CAD), s.v. siriamlexicon
  • Wolfram von Soden, Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (AHw), s.v. siriam(u) / sariamlexicon
  • W. G. E. Watson, "Ugaritic Military Terms in the Light of Comparative Linguistics," in At the Dawn of History: Studies in Honour of J. N. Postgate (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2017), 2:694-714article
  • James E. Hoch, Semitic Words in Egyptian Texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)monograph
  • Yoshiyuki Muchiki, Egyptian Proper Names and Loanwords in North-West Semitic, SBLDS 173 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999)monograph
  • Yigael Yadin, The Art of Warfare in Biblical Lands in the Light of Archaeological Study (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963)monograph
  • Kurt Galling, "Goliath und seine Rüstung," Vetus Testamentum Supplements 15 (1966): 150-169article
  • Azzan Yadin, "Goliath's Armor and Israelite Collective Memory," Vetus Testamentum 54, no. 3 (2004): 373-395article
  • Israel Finkelstein, "The Philistines in the Bible: A Late-Monarchic Perspective," Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 27 (2002): 131-167article
  • P. Kyle McCarter, I Samuel, Anchor Bible 8 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980)commentary
  • David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007)commentary
  • Emanuel Tov, "The Composition of 1 Samuel 16-18 in the Light of the Septuagint Version," in Empirical Models for Biblical Criticism, ed. Jeffrey H. Tigay (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985)article
  • Tamás Dezső, "Scale Armour of the 2nd Millennium B.C.," in Studies on the Ancient Near East (2002)article
  • Timothy Kendall, "gurpisu ša awēli: The Helmets of the Warriors at Nuzi," in Studies on the Civilization and Culture of Nuzi and the Hurrians 1 (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1981), 201-231article
  • Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 151-156monograph
  • Mark S. Smith, The Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Volume 1, VTSup 55 (Leiden: Brill, 1994)monograph

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

All attested forms of שִׁרְיוֹן

m s absolute

שִּׁרְיָן, שִׁרְיוֹן, שִּׁרְיוֹן

1Ki 22:34, 2Ch 18:33, Isa 59:17, 1Sa 17:38, 1Sa 17:5

f p absolute

שִׁרְיֹנוֹת

2Ch 26:14

f s absolute

שִׁרְיָה

Job 41:26

m p absolute

שִּׁרְיֹנִים

Neh 4:16

m s construct

שִׁרְיוֹן

1Sa 17:5