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)
