aromatic powder: fragrant spice ground fine and sold by traveling merchants
This word names a fragrant spice that has been pounded into a fine powder and carried for sale by traveling merchants. It appears only once in the whole Bible, in a wedding song where a figure comes up from the wilderness in a rising column of smoke, "perfumed with myrrh and frankincense, with all the scented powders of the merchant" (Song of Songs 3:6).
It is the feminine form of a more common word for dust (אָבָק), the fine, dry, wind-blown kind that hangs in the air. Everywhere else that dust word turns up it belongs to scenes of dread: the choking soot of a plague, the dust-storm of a curse, the cloud kicked up by a charging army, even the dust beneath God's own advancing feet. Here, and only here, the same picture of fine airborne particles is turned toward luxury: not the dust of judgment but the perfumed haze of costly, imported spice.
The fragrance comes from the setting, not from the bare word. Set beside the traveling merchant who moved myrrh, frankincense, and pounded aromatics along the caravan routes, the powder is unmistakably a luxury cosmetic good, close kin to the world of balsam-spice (בֹּשֶׂם) that fills the rest of the Song. Ancient translators felt the strain of the double sense: the old Greek and Latin versions kept the ordinary word for "dust" and let the phrase "of the merchant" carry the scent, while the Syriac reached instead for its own word that already meant "spice-powder."