N-H-R is what a lit lamp does to a dark room. The glossary's curated sense of the verb: to shine, to give off light, to glow and illuminate; a face shining, a lamp lit so it lights the room; the act of radiating brightness. Not the light source as an object, but light happening: pouring out over everything near it.
The same three consonants also spell nahra, river: in the curated sense, flowing water in volume; the streams that rise and beat against a house, the river of living water. The lexicons treat "shine" and "flow" as two look-alike roots that Aramaic writes identically, and any deeper link between them is speculation, but the ear hears the rhyme anyway: light that pours, water that pours. The corpus uses both, sometimes within the same teaching world of lamps, floods, and living water.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Verb (Peal) | simple stem | nhar (wanhar) | ונהר ܘܰܢܗܰܪ | to give light | to shine (Matthew 17:2) |
| Verb (Aphel) | causative | anhar (wmanhar) | — | to illuminate | it gives light (Matthew 5:15) |
| Noun | nuhr- + -a | nuhra | נוהרא ܢܘܗܪܐ | light | light |
| Adjective | participial | nahir | — | bright | full of light (Matthew 6:22) |
| Noun (homonym root) | nahr- + -a | nahra (pl. nahrawata) | נהרותא ܢܰܗܪܰܘܳܬ݂ܳܐ | river | river, flood |
| Stem | Force | This root | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | simple | nhar | to shine, grow light ("His face shone," Matthew 17:2) |
| Ethpeel | simple passive | not attested | — |
| Pael | intensive | not attested | — |
| Ethpaal | intensive passive | not attested | — |
| Aphel | causative | anhar | to give light, light up ("it gives light to everyone in the house," Matthew 5:15) |
| Ettaphal | causative passive | not attested | — |
| Shaphel | rare causative | not attested | — |
The root flashes once more in Luke 17:24 (lightning that "lights up heaven from one end to the other") and rises as floodwater against the two houses of Matthew 7:25 and 27.
A lamp does not strain to shine. Tonight, turn on one small light in a dark room and watch what it does: no effort, no announcement. The room simply stops being dark. This is the grammar of Matthew 5:16. The command is not "become bright" but "let it shine" (nenhar), stop covering what is already lit. Sit with the difference between manufacturing light and unbasketing it, and ask which one you have been attempting lately.
Hebrew has both branches: nahar (נָהָר), river, everywhere in the Bible; and the rarer light-words nehara (נְהָרָה, "daylight," Job 3:4) and Biblical Aramaic nehora: "light dwells with him" (Daniel 2:22). The menorah, for the record, comes from a different sister root (N-W-R, fire; Aramaic nura), so keep the families straight. Within the 75, this root's shadow-partner is tomorrow's Ḥ-Sh-K, darkness (the pair that Matthew 6:22–23 sets against each other inside the human eye) and its cousin in disclosure is G-L-Y (day 46), revealing. The verb entry carries DJPA attestation: Galilean-closest evidence.
Take two or three minutes and teach a friend the two pourings of N-H-R: the lamp that gives light to the whole house and the rivers of living water out of the heart. Use nuhra, nenhar, and nahrawata, and finish with why "let your light shine" is an uncovering, not a performance.