StrongerBible

sharar

שׁוֹרֵר

HebrewH8324“enemies, foes, ...”

Appears 5 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Psa 5:8(9)Psa 27:11Psa 54:5(7)Psa 56:2(3)Psa 59:10(11)
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeshoh-REHRnoun

What sharar means

a watchful enemy: an opponent who keeps hostile watch over you, waiting for the chance to strike

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyContested

This word shows up only five times in the whole Bible, all of them in the Psalms, and always in the same shape: a group of them, belonging to the speaker, "my watchers." Most lexicons build it from the ordinary Hebrew verb for looking at something or keeping an eye on it (שׁוּר), a verb that elsewhere carries a menacing edge: a lion watching for prey, a trapper crouched over his hidden snare. This word names people who look at you that way.

Every one of the five sits inside a prayer for rescue from personal enemies, and together they sketch one picture:

  • twice the speaker asks God to lead him along a straight, level path because these people are watching him (Psalm 5:8 and Psalm 27:11)
  • once he says they have hounded him all day long (Psalm 56:2)
  • once he trusts God to turn their own harm back on them (Psalm 54:5)
  • once he expects that he will finally be the one doing the looking (Psalm 59:10)

What makes the word worth noticing is that the pressure it describes is not only violence. It is the strain of living under unfriendly observation, where one wrong step will be seized on. That is why the two prayers for a level path ask for it because of these people: the danger is being caught out. In two of the five, their weapon is plainly their mouths, since the nearby lines describe throats full of lies and witnesses who testify falsely.

Ancient and modern translators have heard the word differently. The old Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac versions all flattened it into the ordinary word for enemies (ἐχθρός), and most English Bibles still do. Jerome, translating the Psalms freshly out of Hebrew around the year 400, instead used a Latin word for men lying in ambush at all five places, apparently following a Jewish reading that the older versions had smoothed away. Modern lexicons have largely come back around to his understanding.

Psa 5:8(9)Psa 27:11Psa 54:5(7)Psa 56:2(3)Psa 59:10(11)

Disputed

What the word denotes: a foe who lies in wait, a slanderer, or simply an enemy.

  • majorityOne who watches with hostile intent, lying in wait for an opening. The lie-in-wait nuance of שׁוּר I is already attested internally at Numbers 23:9, Jeremiah 5:26, and Hosea 13:7, it yields good sense at all five occurrences, and the superscription of Psalm 59 ties that psalm to men posted to watch David's house.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1004, s.v. שׁוֹרֵר; Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50 (Word Biblical Commentary 19, 1983); Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51-100 (Word Biblical Commentary 20, 1990), with the Excursus: Enemies in the Psalms; John Goldingay, Psalms, 3 vols. (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms, 2006-2008); Jerome, Psalter iuxta Hebraeos (ca. 390-405), rendering insidiator at Ps 5:9, 27:11, 54:7, 56:3, 59:11
  • minorityA generic member of the stock enemy vocabulary of the individual lament, carrying no special watching nuance and best rendered simply my enemies or my adversaries, alongside אֹיְבַי, צָרַי, פֹּעֲלֵי אָוֶן and רְשָׁעִים.; Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen (Handkommentar zum Alten Testament II/2, Gottingen 1926); Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalmen (Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament XV, 5th ed. 1978; ET Fortress 1988-89); Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 2 and Psalms 3 (Hermeneia, Fortress 2005/2011); Septuagint Psalms, rendering echthroi at every occurrence; likewise Targum Tehillim and the Peshitta
  • minorityA defamer or slanderer, on the strength of the El-Amarna Canaanite verb sharu, to slander or defame; the surrounding vocabulary of lying speech and false witness in Psalms 5, 27, 56 and 59 is said to make the nuance manifest.; Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100 (Anchor Bible 17, Doubleday 1968), 23, 25-26; W. F. Albright, BASOR 89 (1943), 30 n. 13

What scholars say about sharar

The lexica divide over the derivation. BDB (1004) makes שׁוֹרֵר its own headword, glosses it (insidious) watcher, and parses it as a Poel participle of שׁוּר I, to watch, look, lie in wait, with the prefixed mem elided (citing GKC 52s), cross-referencing שׁוּר I sense 2b and its ambush texts at Num 23:9, Jer 5:26 and Hos 13:7; it posits no separate hostility root. Gesenius/Tregelles files the form the same way under שׁוּר I, a lier in wait, an enemy. Strong's (8324) and TWOT (2469) instead posit a distinct primitive root שָׁרַר, to be hostile, attested only in the participle, and distinguish it from שֹׁרֶר, navel (Ezek 16:4; Prov 3:8; Song 7:3). HALOT is standardly cited as treating the word under a hostile-watching root with comparative Semitic material, and Gesenius 18. Auflage almost certainly expands the cognate discussion, but neither entry was verified verbatim for this survey and both should be checked against the printed volumes; DCH VIII (2011) catalogues the occurrences as a substantival participle glossed along the lines of watcher, foe, without comparative cognates, per its editorial policy. TDOT has no article on the lexeme. On cognates: Arabic sharra, to be evil, is phonologically clean but semantically loose, and was adopted by neither BDB nor Gesenius/Tregelles (Kaltner's methodological critique, CBQMS 28, applies); Akkadian sararu, to be false, fails the regular sound correspondence, since Akkadian s answers Hebrew sin or samek rather than shin; El-Amarna Canaanite sharu, to slander, parsed by Albright as a passive preterit of the hollow root appearing in Hebrew as shur, to trick or betray, is the genuine comparative datum behind Dahood's defamer, though Dahood's cognate was Amarna and not Ugaritic, which offers no secure root shrr, to be hostile. Barr's caution favours the internal derivation, since Hebrew שׁוּר, to lie in wait, is well attested and yields good sense everywhere. On the versions: LXX, Targum Tehillim and the Peshitta all flatten the word to generic enemy vocabulary, although Greek had ready alternatives (epibouleuon, enedreuon, epiteron); Jerome's Psalter iuxta Hebraeos alone renders insidiator at all five undisputed verses, breaking the pattern only at Ps 92:12 (hostes meos), which is itself evidence that his Jewish informants did not identify the defective spelling there with the same word. The Hexaplaric readings of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion were not securely retrieved and would sharpen the picture of how the insidiator tradition reached Jerome. Among moderns the German Psalms commentaries render meine Feinde or meine Widersacher and treat the word as stock lament vocabulary without mounting philological arguments or emending, whereas the English commentaries preserve the participial nuance (those who lie in wait for me, my watchful foes); Dahood's defamers has been received coolly and is followed by none of Craigie, Tate, Kraus, Hossfeld-Zenger or Goldingay. The wider form-critical debate over the identity of the enemies in the individual laments, from Mowinckel and Birkeland through Keel, Ruppert and Croft, does not single this lexeme out for special weight.

Where scholars disagree about sharar

Where the word comes from: whether it is a participle of the ordinary verb שׁוּר, to look or watch, or the participle of a distinct root שׁרר meaning to be hostile.

  • majorityA Poel participle of שׁוּר I, to watch, look, lie in wait, with the prefixed mem elided; the gloss (insidious) watcher is adequate and no separate hostility root need be posited, since the lie-in-wait nuance is already attested internally at Num 23:9, Jer 5:26 and Hos 13:7.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1004, s.v. שׁוֹרֵר; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, trans. S. P. Tregelles (1846), s.v. שׁוּר I; James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1968)
  • minorityA separate primitive root שָׁרַר, to be hostile, attested only in the participle and often compared with Arabic sharr, evil.; R. Laird Harris, ed., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, no. 2469

Whether Psalm 92:11 (Hebrew 92:12), whose consonantal spelling is defective, is a sixth occurrence of this word or a form of the ordinary verb for seeing. There are no ketiv/qere variants and no clear Qumran evidence to settle it.

  • majorityThe defective spelling is an orthographic variant of the same lexeme, so the word occurs six times.; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VIII: Sin-Taw (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011)
  • minorityThe form at Ps 92:12 belongs elsewhere and should not be counted with the other five; BDB cross-references it but lists it separately, Dahood pointedly excludes it from his list of five, and Jerome breaks his own pattern there by rendering hostes meos rather than insidiatores meos.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1004; Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100 (Anchor Bible 17, Doubleday 1968); Jerome, Psalter iuxta Hebraeos (ca. 390-405), at Ps 92:12
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

  • BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1004, s.v. שׁוֹרֵרlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, trans. S. P. Tregelles (1846), s.v. שׁוּר Ilexicon
  • R. Laird Harris, ed., Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, no. 2469theological-dictionary
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VIII: Sin-Taw (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011)lexicon
  • Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, vol. IV (Brill, 1999)lexicon
  • Mitchell Dahood, Psalms II: 51-100 (Anchor Bible 17, Doubleday 1968), 23, 25-26commentary
  • W. F. Albright, BASOR 89 (1943), 30 n. 13article
  • Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50 (Word Biblical Commentary 19, 1983)commentary
  • Marvin E. Tate, Psalms 51-100 (Word Biblical Commentary 20, 1990)commentary
  • John Goldingay, Psalms, 3 vols. (Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms, 2006-2008)commentary
  • Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalmen (Biblischer Kommentar Altes Testament XV, 5th ed. 1978; ET Fortress 1988-89)commentary
  • Frank-Lothar Hossfeld and Erich Zenger, Psalms 2 and Psalms 3 (Hermeneia, Fortress 2005/2011)commentary
  • Hermann Gunkel, Die Psalmen (Handkommentar zum Alten Testament II/2, Gottingen 1926)commentary
  • James Barr, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford, 1968)monograph
  • John Kaltner, The Use of Arabic in Biblical Hebrew Lexicography (Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 28, 1996)monograph
  • Harris Birkeland, The Evildoers in the Book of Psalms (Oslo, 1955)monograph
  • Othmar Keel, Feinde und Gottesleugner (Stuttgarter Biblische Monographien 7, 1969)monograph
  • Steven J. L. Croft, The Identity of the Individual in the Psalms (JSOTSup 44, Sheffield, 1987)monograph

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

All attested forms of שׁוֹרֵר

m p construct

שׁוֹרְרָי, שֹׁרְרָי, שׁוֹרְרַי

Psa 5:8, Psa 27:11, Psa 54:5, Psa 59:10, Psa 56:2