HUMBLE, lowly — and built on the root behind ani, POOR or AFFLICTED, so the word names a person brought low rather than a person of mild manners. Rashi glosses it with two words, shafal and savlan: lowly, and one who ENDURES. ⚠ That second sense is why the shelf’s traditional ‘meek’ (KJV, Geneva, ASV, Douay; NWT presses to ‘by far the meekest’) now misleads — modern English has drifted ‘meek’ toward timidity, which is not what a man who has just faced down a nation is being called. This translation reads ‘humble’ with NIV. ⚠ The word’s one famous appearance is Numbers 12:3 (already on these pages), where the narrator calls Moses more anav than any human alive — immediately after the chapter in which he asked God to kill him rather than carry this people another day. It is also the standing self-difficulty of the traditional claim that Moses wrote the Torah: whoever wrote that sentence wrote that he was the humblest man on earth. → first discussed at Num 12:3