Aramaic for the one who drives the flock. The likely word behind the third title Yeshua refused.
The full definition
Dabbara is Aramaic, from the root dalet-bet-resh, to drive or to lead the way a shepherd drives a flock. The same three letters carry davar, word, and midbar, the wilderness where flocks are driven. A dabbara is the man out front whose path becomes everyone's path.
The Greek of Matthew 23:10 gives us kathēgētēs, the guide who walks in front. But Yeshua taught in Galilean Aramaic, and Dabbara is the most likely word underneath the Greek. Honesty requires saying it is a reconstruction; nobody has the sentence on a first-century scrap. What we do have is the shape of the refusal it belongs to. Three titles declined in a row, each one a chair with a single seat: the teacher whose reading becomes the standard, the father whose name confers standing, the driver whose direction becomes the flock's. Dabbara names the third chair. Yeshua reserved it for the Mashiach alone, and then spent his life walking beside people rather than in front of them.
Key passages
- Matthew 23:10