Bisha is bad in the widest, plainest sense: morally evil, harmful, or simply of poor quality. It covers both the actively wicked and the merely worthless or spoiled: the rotten fish thrown out of the net, the bad tree, the bad store a heart draws from, and the accuser himself. One word for what is no good, whether in character or in kind.
The family has a second, inward face. From the older spelling with an alef, b-ʾ-sh, comes the verb "to go ill, to be displeased": the hot stir of inner offense, a sense of wrong rising up. When Yeshua sees the children being pushed away, the corpus says he was indignant: wrongness registered in the body as heat. The root that names what is wrong also names what it feels like when wrong is done in front of you.
| Form | Pattern | Transliteration | Script | Standard | Qala rendering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bisha | adjective / noun, m. | bišā | בישא ܒ݁ܺܝܫܳܐ | evil, bad, wicked | what is wrong; bad (57× in the corpus) |
| bishata | adjective, f. pl. | bišātā | בישתא ܒ݁ܺܝܫܳܬ݂ܳܐ | evil things | bad things (Mt 12:35) |
| etbesh | Ethpeel verb (from b-ʾ-sh) | weʾtbeʾš | ואתבאש ܘܶܐܬ݂ܒ݁ܶܐܫ | be much displeased | to be indignant (Mk 10:14) |
| Stem | Form | Sense | In this corpus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Peal | bʾesh | to be bad, to go ill | scaffold form; the base sense under the family |
| Ethpeel | etbeʾsh | to be displeased, indignant | attested: weʾtbeʾš, Mk 10:14 |
| Pael | — | — | not attested |
| Ethpaal | — | — | not attested |
| Aphel | — | — | not attested |
| Ettaphal | — | — | not attested |
Bring to mind something spoiled: bread gone off, fruit past saving. The Aramaic ear hears the same word there that it hears in "the evil one": not a cosmic abstraction first, but the plain fact of a thing that is no good. Now notice one place in your own week where something is quietly going bad: a habit, a resentment, a corner cut. Don't dramatize it. Just name it with the corpus's plainness: this is bisha, this is what is wrong. Naming it that simply is the first move of the last petition.
The Hebrew cognate is baʾash, "to stink, to be foul"; the manna that bred worms and stank carries this root, and the alef of that older spelling still sits inside the Syriac verb etbeʾsh. The natural opposite in the 75 is Ṭ-W-B, goodness: Matthew 12:35 sets the two side by side, store against store. And the corpus keeps this root's idioms honest: where the Greek of Matthew 6:23 speaks of a "bad eye," the reading gives its force: "But if your eye is divided, your whole body is full of darkness" (interlinear), the bad eye of the old idiom being the grasping, divided one.
Explain to a friend, in two or three minutes, why one Aramaic word can cover a rotten fish and the accuser. Use Matthew 13:48 (the bad fish thrown away) and Matthew 6:13 (rescue us from what is wrong), and let the word bisha carry both. Finish by saying what changes when "deliver us from evil" is heard as "rescue us from what is wrong."