even

This is the everyday word for a stone: the thing a person picks up, carries, throws, shapes, or lays in a wall. Its range is set by what people do with stones rather than by size or grandeur. The same word covers the pebble David puts in his sling and the finished blocks of Solomon's temple, and nothing in the word itself tells you which is meant.

That is what separates it from Hebrew's other rock words. A crag or cliff (סֶלַע) and a massive outcrop (צוּר) belong to the landscape and cannot be moved, and those are the words the Psalms reach for when God is called a rock. This word almost never works that way. It names stone that human hands gather, cut, haul, and hurl, which is exactly why it turns up in the famous building pictures: the point there is a stone somebody placed, not a mountain.

Because stone did so much of the work in Israel's world, one Hebrew word reaches across jobs that English divides up:

• Walls, altars, pavements and quarried blocks were all stone, and the law even forbade iron tools on the stones of an altar.
• The covenant was written on stone tablets, and Joshua cut the law into stones set up at Shechem.
• A stone stood on end, or heaped up, was the ordinary way of making a moment permanent and giving it a witness.
• Stones were both the weapon in a slinger's hand and the means by which a community carried out a death sentence.
• Stone in the ground was where iron, copper and gems came from, and stone falling out of the sky was hail.

When the word stands next to the name of a particular mineral, or next to a word meaning "precious" or "rare", it means a gem. These are the twelve engraved stones on the high priest's breastpiece, one for each tribe; the jewels the queen of Sheba brings Solomon; the stock David lays up for the temple; and the gems that make up the walls of the restored city in Isaiah's vision.

Which gems, exactly, is another matter. Ancient stone names did not line up with modern mineral names, and the old translations already disagreed with each other. The best known case is the stone long rendered "sapphire", which was almost certainly lapis lazuli, a deep blue stone unrelated to what a jeweller today would call sapphire. Reading these lists is educated guesswork, and confident identifications deserve suspicion.

The word itself has not changed meaning here. It is still simply stone; the value comes from the modifier and the setting.

Balance scales work by putting a known weight in one pan and the goods in the other, and in Israel that weight was a shaped stone kept in a pouch. So the word for stone is also the word for a weight. "A stone and a stone" is not a riddle: it names the trick of carrying two sets of weights, a heavy one for buying and a light one for selling, which the law and the prophets treat as theft.

Archaeologists have recovered hundreds of these inscribed stone weights from Judah, small polished domes marked with their value. They solved an old puzzle: a word in 1 Samuel 13:21 that nobody could translate turned out to name a weight of about two thirds of a shekel, matching the little stones that came out of the ground.

A weight also hangs on a line to test whether a wall is true, and that second kind of measuring stone stands behind two harder passages, one in Isaiah and one in Zechariah.

Stone is cold, heavy, and unresponsive, and Hebrew makes a picture out of each of those properties. A heart of stone is one that has stopped responding: Ezekiel's promise is that God will take the stone heart out and put a heart of flesh in its place, and when Nabal hears what he has done, his heart becomes stone and he dies.

The weight of stone gives a second set of images. Pharaoh's army goes down in the sea like a stone, the nations stand as still as stone while Israel passes by, and Jerusalem becomes a stone so heavy that everyone who tries to lift it is hurt. A third picture works from how common stones are: in Solomon's Jerusalem silver is said to be as ordinary as stones in the street, which is a way of saying it had stopped being worth anything.

Two of these figures became famous later. Isaiah says the LORD himself will be a stone people trip over, and Habakkuk has the stone in the wall of a house built on bloodshed cry out against its builder. Both work because everyone knows a stone is exactly the thing that neither moves nor speaks.