The Hebrew word בֵּן (ben) means “son.” But like its Aramaic cousin bar, it does far more in the Hebrew Bible than name a male child. Ben assigns belonging — to a family, a people, a class, even a category of being. And in two very different “son of” phrases, that flexibility opens onto some of the strangest territory in scripture.

The first is ben adam — “son of man,” the Hebrew form of the title Jesus would later carry in Aramaic. Everywhere in the Hebrew Bible except Daniel’s single Aramaic verse, “son of man” is ben adam, and it means exactly what ben plus “humanity” should mean: a member of the human race, a mortal. When God addresses the prophet Ezekiel — and he does it more than ninety times — he calls him ben adam, “son of man,” with the force of “you mortal, you creature of dust.” When a psalm marvels that God pays attention to humans at all, it asks, “What is man, that you are mindful of him, and the son of man, that you care for him?” — and the two halves mean the same thing. Ben adam is humanity in its frailty, here today and gone. This is the plain bedrock the whole Son-of-Man title rests on: at its root, it simply means “the human one.”

The second phrase pulls the opposite direction. Bene elohim — “sons of God” — uses the same word ben, but now to assign belonging not to humanity but to the divine realm. These are the members of God’s heavenly court, the divine council. In Genesis 6, the “sons of God” see the daughters of men; in Job, “the sons of God” present themselves before the LORD when the Accuser comes among them; in Psalm 82, God takes his stand in the divine assembly and judges among the “gods,” the elohim, the heavenly beings who answer to him. Here ben names heavenly creatures who stand in God’s presence — a category of being above the mortal one that ben adam names.

That’s the remarkable thing about ben: the same construction that means “frail human” in ben adam means “heavenly being” in bene elohim. The word marks belonging, and the only question is — belonging to what? Earth, or the council of heaven?

This is the very ambiguity the Son-of-Man title would later exploit. Daniel 7 sees “one like a son of man” — a ben adam figure, human-shaped — but he comes on the clouds, approaches the Ancient of Days, and receives a kingdom that never ends. The title built from ben, the word for the lowliest mortal, gets shot heavenward into the company that bene elohim names. In English “Son of Man” sounds like a claim to be merely human. In Hebrew, the word ben itself already held both worlds — the dust of ben adam and the throne room of the bene elohim — and the title quietly drew on both.