Eshti is to drink: the verb of thirst answered. It is the second half of the body's oldest pair: eating and drinking, named together again and again in the corpus as the plain machinery of staying alive. Where bread must be broken and chewed, drinking is simpler and more urgent; a person survives weeks without laḥma and only days without water.
This root family surfaces in the corpus wherever thirst does: in the worry sayings ("What will we drink?"), in the cup of cold water given to a little one, in a Samaritan noon when Yeshua himself is the thirsty one, and at the last meal, where the cup is passed with a one-word command from this root. The verb never becomes abstract; even at its most solemn, someone is actually swallowing.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| eshti | Peal verb, perfect | eshti | אשתי ܐܫܬܝ | to drink | drink |
| eshtaw | Peal imperative, plural | eshtaw | אשתו ܐܫܬܘ | drink! | "Drink from it, all of you" (Matthew 26:27) |
| shate | Peal active participle | shāte | שתא ܫܬܐ | drinking; a drinker | drinking · a drinker (Luke 7:33–34) |
| meshtuta | noun (m-pattern) | meshtutā | משתותא ܡܫܬܘܬܐ | banquet, wedding feast | the wedding feast: literally "the drinking" (standard Syriac; so the Peshitta names the wedding at Cana) |
| Stem | Form | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| Peal | eshti | to drink, the working stem: imperative eshtaw (Matthew 26:27), imperfect neshte (Matthew 6:31), participle shate (Luke 7:33–34) |
| Ethpeel | — | not attested in this corpus |
| Aphel | — | "give to drink" (grammar scaffold); the corpus more often reaches for a different root (sh-q-y) for giving drink |
| Pael / Ethpaal / Ettaphal | — | not attested in this corpus |
Wait until you are actually thirsty today (don't manufacture it, just notice when it arrives) and then drink slowly, feeling the specific relief of it. Thirst is the body's most honest prayer: it asks for exactly what it needs and is satisfied when it gets it. Hold that beside the worry question "What will we drink?" and feel the difference between thirst, which is real and answerable, and worry, which is neither.
Hebrew shatah, "to drink," is the direct cognate, and Hebrew built its banquet word the same way Syriac did: mishteh (the feast as "the drinking") is how the book of Esther names its banquets, just as the Peshitta calls the wedding at Cana a meshtuta. One honesty note: in the unvoweled script, ܫܬܐ can also spell shta, "six": a different word entirely, and it is that numeral which currently holds the glossary's entry for these letters. Within the 75, this verb pairs with ʾ-K-L, eating (root 59) in the corpus's fixed pair "eating and drinking," drinks the M-Y-ʾ, water (root 56) and Ḥ-M-R, wine (root 58) of the two lessons before it, and completes the worry-triad of Matthew 6 with L-B-Sh, clothing (root 61).
Take two or three minutes and explain eshti to a friend through three cups: the cup of cold water given to a little one, the cup asked for at the well in Samaria, and the cup passed at the last meal with the word eshtaw: "drink, all of you." Point out that the verb stays physical in all three, and that the grammar of the last one is plural on purpose.