Saturday, October 10, 2020

Holger Gzella on פלח in Daniel 7:14 denoting Religious Worship/Service in Biblical Aramaic

 

 

And there was given him [the Son of Man] dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve (Aram: פלח) him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed. (Dan 7:14)

 

The Aramaic verb פלח is used exclusively for religious service in biblical Aramaic, adding to Dan 7:14 being Old Testament support for the worship of Jesus, who identifies himself as the eschatological Son of Man in the Gospels. In the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, we read the following:

 

III. Religious Use. Since Aramaic also designates God as “lord” beginning in the earliest sources, a religious use of the verb plḥ to mean “to serve God” is obvious. This service finds expression primarily in cultic worship and personal piety, while plḥ has the nuance here of “to revere, to worship.” Thus, it occurs in Imperial Aramiac in a grave inscription from Egypt in the wish that the deceased may serve Osiris in the afterlife: hwy plḥh, thus an imperative with a verbal participle “be serving” or, more likely, with a substantival participle “be a servant/worshiper.” In any case, the participle functions substantivally in the construct. In the phrase plḥ ʾlhʾ “worshiper of the gods” it occurs in memorial inscriptions from Hatra.

 

Biblical Aramaic employs plḥ exclusively with a religious connotation: in Dnl. 3:12, 14, 18, 28 for idol worship that Daniel and his companions avoid, in 6:17, 21 for the worship of the true God, and, finally, in 7:14, 27 for the defining relationship of the whole world—all nations and especially all powers—with God at the dawn of his eschatological kingdom. Ezra 7:24 employs the participle plḥy byt ʾlhʾ in a more restricted, probably summary, sense for the other cultic personnel in addition to various functions previously mentioned explicitly.

 

The few pertinent instances from Qumran reflect the same semantic spectrum: in 4Q550 7+7a:1, plḥ denotes the worship among the Jews; in a vision of Noah in 1QapGen 15:18, in contrast, perhaps pagan idol worship (although in a very fragmentary context). The two small fragments 4Q570 16:4 (C-stem?) and 17:2 are preserved with insufficient contexts. (Holger Gzella, “פלח,” in Holger Gzella ed., Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, Volume 16: Aramaic Dictionary [trans. Mark E. Biddle; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2018], 607)

 

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