Lbesh is to put on, to be clothed: drawing a garment onto the body and wearing it. The Palestinian Aramaic dictionary gives the root as "to wear, put on, clothe"; this was everyday Galilean speech for the second skin every human being lives inside.
In the corpus, what you wear does a lot of talking. Soft robes place a man in a king's palace. Purple marks the rich man at his gate. A restored son gets the best robe before he gets a word in. A healed man is found "clothed and in his right mind": dress and sanity named in one breath. And in the worry teaching, clothing is the third of the body's three anxieties, answered by grass that God himself dresses better than Solomon. The root's quiet grammar lesson: much of our clothing, in the deepest sense, is something done to us.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| lbesh | Peal verb, perfect | lbesh | לבש ܠܒܫ | to clothe, put on | put on · wore (13 occurrences; PA / DJPA attested) |
| lbish | Peal passive participle | lbish | לביש ܠܒܝܫ | clothed, arrayed | dressed in · wearing (Matthew 11:8) |
| lbusha | noun, emphatic | lbushā | לבושא ܠܒܘܫܐ | garment, clothing | clothes: "the body more than clothes" (Matthew 6:25) |
| Stem | Form | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| Peal | lbesh | to put on, wear: what a person does with a garment |
| Aphel | albesh | to clothe someone else: God dressing the grass (Matthew 6:30), the father's "put it on him" (Luke 15:22) |
| Ethpeel | — | to be clothed (grammar scaffold); not attested in this corpus |
| Pael / Ethpaal / Ettaphal | — | not attested in this corpus |
Tomorrow morning, notice the moment you get dressed: the actual seconds of putting something on. It is the day's first small act of self-presentation, usually done without a thought. As you do it, hold the two garments of this lesson together: the clothing you choose in order to be seen a certain way, and the robe in the parable, which the son did not choose, did not deserve, and could not have put on himself.
Hebrew lavash, "to wear, put on," is the direct cognate, and Arabic labisa with its noun libas, "clothing," carries the same root. Aramaic, like Hebrew, lets this verb reach past cloth: a person can be clothed in strength, in shame, in splendor, which is why the healed man of the tombs, "clothed and in his right mind" (Mark 5:15, Luke 8:35), reads as one restoration, not two. Within the 75, this root closes the worry-triad of Matthew 6 alongside ʾ-K-L, eating (root 59) and Sh-T-Y, drinking (root 60): what you'll eat, what you'll drink, what you'll wear: three verbs, one answer.
Take two or three minutes and explain lbesh to a friend using the three wardrobes of this lesson: the soft robes in the palace, the grass God dresses better than Solomon, and the best robe thrown over the returning son. Point out the grammar as you go (in two of the three, the verb is causative: someone else is doing the clothing) and ask your friend where in their life they have been dressed by another's hand.