Genesis 49:9

9. Whelp of a lion Three different Hebrew words are here employed for lion, represented in our translation by whelp, lion, and lioness. The patriarch first calls Judah a lion’s whelp, and then directly addresses him, as if, like a lion, he had seized his prey, and having eaten what he would, had gone up to his lair in the mountains. He then resumes the third person, and pictures the victorious lion as having bowed and crouched down, either for repose or in readiness to pounce upon any victim which might approach him. In this crouching attitude he is further described as a lioness, fiercest of all the lion family, and most dangerous to rouse up in the lair. Hence the apocalyptic expression, “lion of the tribe of Judah,” (Revelation 5:5. ) “The form of this vision came from remembered sights and sounds in the far-away Syrian mountains, but its substance came from an energy, courage, and might that were to burst upon the world in still increasing splendour through successive generations, yet incomprehensible to the wisest prophet in advance of their historic development. It came from Jerusalem, the Ariel, ‘or lion of God’ from David, who, in one of his loftiest lyrics, cried, ‘Thou hast given me the necks of mine enemies,’ (Psalms 18:40,) from the ‘Lion of the tribe of Judah,’ whose eyes are one day to be turned upon men ‘like a flame of fire,’ and his voice to fill the world ‘like the sound of many waters . ’” Newhall .