StrongerBible

shatan

שָׁתַן

HebrewH8366“male, urinate, ...”

Appears 6 times · tap a cell to see the verses

1Sa 25:221Sa 25:341Ki 14:101Ki 16:111Ki 21:212Ki 9:8
Word studyResearch-gradeshaw-TAHNverb

What shatan means

to urinate: in the Bible only ever inside the coarse phrase "one who urinates against a wall", a contemptuous way of saying "a male", used when a whole household is to be wiped out

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

The verb by itself simply means "to urinate". It never stands alone in the Hebrew Bible. All six times it appears, it appears in one frozen phrase, joined to the word for a wall: "one who urinates against a wall". The phrase means "a male", and it is only ever used in a sentence about killing every male of a family or a royal line.

What makes the phrase worth stopping over is that Hebrew had perfectly ordinary words available. There is a plain word for a male (זָכָר) and a plain word for a man (אִישׁ), and the speakers here step around both of them. Instead they reduce the men of a doomed house to a body function anyone can picture. It is chosen crudeness, and the choice is the message: the house being condemned is worth no better words than these.

All six uses share the same setting, an announcement or a report that a household has been erased down to its last male:

  • David swears in anger that by morning he will leave Nabal's household not one male alive
  • Abigail is told afterward that her quick action is what spared them
  • a prophet tells Jeroboam that every male of his house will be cut off
  • the usurper Zimri wipes out the house of Baasha and leaves it no male at all
  • Elijah delivers the same sentence against Ahab
  • the young prophet who anoints Jehu repeats that sentence as Jehu's commission

Because the words are so blunt, translators face a real choice. Say "every male" and the meaning is right but the insult vanishes; keep the literal wording, as older English Bibles did with "him that pisseth against the wall", and the crudeness survives but now reads as merely odd. Neither option gives an English reader what a Hebrew listener heard: a formula of doom that also spits on its target.

1Sa 25:221Sa 25:341Ki 14:101Ki 16:111Ki 21:212Ki 9:8

Disputed

Whether the phrase is a neutral term for a male person or a deliberately degrading epithet chosen for its shock value.

  • contestedA coarse, deliberately chosen epithet whose rhetorical work is contempt: it appears exclusively in curses and reports of dynastic extermination, and the choice of this phrase over the available neutral terms for a male is self-aware. Increasingly the reading of recent literary and commentary work.; Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: Norton, 1999), on 1 Samuel 25:22; Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (AB 11; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988), 107; Claude Mariottini, Rereading the Biblical Text (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2017), ch. 22, 72-77
  • contestedAn idiomatic, if earthy, designation for a male, adequately rendered "every male"; the reference lexica gloss it as a synonym for a male person and assign the connotation no independent weight.; HALOT, s.v. שׁתן; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VIII (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), s.v. שׁתן

What scholars say about shatan

BDB brackets the entry [שָׁתַן] and treats the root as a secondary formation from a primary שׁין (cf. the noun שַׁיִן "urine"), the Qal being unattested; Gesenius, following Simonis, denied any trace of a root שׁתן and analyzed הִשְׁתִּין as a contracted Hithpael הִשְׁתַּיֵּן from √שׁין, with the -t- as the reflexive infix. HALOT retains the modern convention of a separate Hiphil-only verb שׁתן "to urinate", cross-referencing the derived noun שֶׁתֶן (unattested biblically, productive in Rabbinic Hebrew), while DCH describes the fixed collocation מַשְׁתִּין בְּקִיר synchronically as "urinator against a wall", glossed idiomatically "male, man". The comparative evidence favours a genuine Proto-Semitic root of the III-weak type: CAD lists šânu B "to urinate" (√šyn) from Old Babylonian on, the plurale tantum šīnātu "urine", and crucially a t-augmented variant šatānu attested in the Assyrian Dream Book, the exact morphological parallel to the Hebrew form; Jewish Babylonian Aramaic has Aphel אַשְׁתִּין with the noun שֶׁתֶן. Kogan classifies *šyn as an East-Central Semitic isogloss (Akkadian, Hebrew, Aramaic), absent from Ugaritic, Arabic (which uses √bwl), and Ge'ez. All the major lexica cite the same six attestations (1 Samuel 25:22, 34; 1 Kings 14:10; 16:11; 21:21; 2 Kings 9:8) and gloss the referent as a male person; Gesenius alone narrowed it to "a little boy" on ethnographic grounds (Herodotus 2.35, Ammianus Marcellinus 23.6), a refinement taken up by Lewy but otherwise unpersuasive. Critical commentators on Samuel and Kings (McCarter, Tsumura, Klein, Alter, Cogan, Cogan-Tadmor, Sweeney, Fritz, Seow, Gray) are unanimous on the male referent, and Alter and Cogan-Tadmor stress the vulgar register as a rhetorical choice. Five of the six occurrences stand in a stereotyped judgment formula against the rejected northern dynasties, paired with the debated merism עָצוּר וְעָזוּב (read by Cogan-Tadmor as effectively synonymous, "restrained and abandoned") and with the corpse-desecration curse; Cross, McKenzie, and Halpern read the cluster as a Deuteronomistic prophecy-fulfilment scheme delegitimating each northern house in turn, and the 1 Samuel 25 pair as the same vocabulary lent to David's oath. The versions diverge instructively: LXX calques οὐροῦντα πρὸς τοῖχον and the Vulgate mingentem ad parietem (whence the KJV), whereas Targum Jonathan euphemizes with יָדַע מַדָּע, roughly "one possessing discernment"; the Masoretes recorded no qere at any of the six verses, and the Chronicler, who does not narrate the northern oracles at all, never uses the phrase.

Where scholars disagree about shatan

Whether the phrase מַשְׁתִּין בְּקִיר denotes a male human being or, as an ancient rabbinic reading held, a dog.

  • majorityIt denotes a male person; all the standard lexica and every modern critical commentator on Samuel and Kings gloss the six attestations as a totalizing formula for the extermination of a household's or dynasty's males.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 1010, s.v. [שָׁתַן]; HALOT (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), vol. 4, s.v. שׁתן; P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (AB 8; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 389-402; Mordechai Cogan, 1 Kings (AB 10; New York: Doubleday, 2001), notes at 14:10, 16:11, 21:21
  • minorityIt refers to a dog, the creature whose nature it is to urinate against a wall, so that the curse means "not even a dog will I leave him"; the reading originates in a halakhic discussion at b. Bava Batra 19b and was adopted by medieval commentators, Kimhi treating it as hyperbole alongside the plain sense "males".; b. Bava Batra 19b (on m. Bava Batra 2:1); Rashi and David Kimhi (Radak) on 1 Samuel 25:22 and 1 Kings 14:10; Johann Jahn, Biblical Archaeology I.2, §77; Julius Fürst, Hebräisches und Chaldäisches Handwörterbuch, s.v.

Whether שׁתן is an independent triliteral root or a t-augmented formation from a primary root שׁין "to urinate".

  • contestedA t-stem formation from √שׁין, the infixed -t- later reanalyzed as a third radical; the Qal is unattested, the noun שַׁיִן supplies the primary root, and Akkadian offers both šânu B (√šyn) and the variant šatānu as the exact morphological parallel.; Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, tr. Tregelles (London, 1857), 856, following Johann Simonis, Lexicon Hebraicum et Chaldaicum, 2nd ed.; BDB, 1010, s.v. [שָׁתַן], citing Nöldeke, ZDMG 37 (1883): 537; CAD Š/3 (1992), 40, s.v. šatānu
  • contestedAn independent triliteral שׁתן, listed as a root in its own right (attested only in the causative stem) with the derived noun שֶׁתֶן "urine"; this is the settled convention of the modern reference lexica, which treat the diachronic derivation as unrecoverable.; HALOT (Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), vol. 4, s.v. שׁתן; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VIII (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), s.v. שׁתן
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 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 1010, s.v. [שָׁתַן]lexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner, ed. M. E. J. Richardson; Leiden: Brill, 1994-2000), vol. 4, s.v. שׁתןlexicon
  • David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. VIII (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), s.v. שׁתןlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon, tr. S. P. Tregelles (London, 1857), 856, s.v. שָׁתַןlexicon
  • CAD Š/2 (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1992), 375-76, s.v. šânu B; CAD Š/3 (1992), 38-40, s.v. šīnātu, šatānulexicon
  • Jastrow, Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: Choreb, 1903), 1637, s.v. הִשְׁתִּיןlexicon
  • Leonid Kogan, Genealogical Classification of Semitic (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015)monograph
  • P. Kyle McCarter Jr., I Samuel (AB 8; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 389-402commentary
  • David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 577, 593commentary
  • Robert Alter, The David Story: A Translation with Commentary of 1 and 2 Samuel (New York: Norton, 1999)monograph
  • Mordechai Cogan, 1 Kings (AB 10; New York: Doubleday, 2001), notes at 14:10, 16:11, 21:21commentary
  • Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, II Kings (AB 11; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1988), 107commentary
  • Duane E. Smith, "'Pisser against a Wall': An Echo of Divination in Biblical Hebrew," CBQ 72/4 (2010): 699-717article
  • Julius Lewy, "Lexicographical Notes," HUCA 12-13 (1937-38): 99-101article
  • Steven L. McKenzie, The Trouble with Kings (VTSup 42; Leiden: Brill, 1991)monograph
  • Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1973), ch. 10monograph

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

All attested forms of שָׁתַן

hiphil participle m s absolute

מַשְׁתִּין

1Sa 25:22, 1Sa 25:34, 1Ki 14:10, 1Ki 16:11, 1Ki 21:21, 2Ki 9:8