a doe: the female deer, the wild animal of Israel's hills and open country
This is the word for a female deer, a doe or hind. Hebrew has a separate word for the male (אַיָּל), and the difference is not incidental: in most places this word appears, the fact that the animal is female is doing real work in the picture.
Israel's poets watched this animal closely, and the same few observations come back again and again:
- she gives birth alone in wild country, at a moment no one is there to see
- she runs and climbs over broken rock without losing her footing
- she is quick, beautiful, and impossible to hold, which makes her a natural picture of a woman or of a people set free
Nothing about the word itself is difficult, and it never drifts into a second meaning. The interest lies entirely in what the writers do with the animal: the same doe stands behind a soldier's thanksgiving for sure feet, a drought report about a mother abandoning her newborn, and a husband's praise of his wife.
The one odd appearance is in the heading of Psalm 22, where the phrase "The Doe of the Dawn" appears to name the melody the psalm was sung to rather than to say anything about deer at all.
Nuances
Whether Psalm 29:9 says that the voice of the LORD makes the does give birth or that it makes the great trees writhe. The consonantal text permits vocalization either as ayyalot, "does," or as elot, "terebinths."
- contestedThe verse names the animal. The storm theophany drives the does into premature labor, and the word is listed under ayyalah in the standard lexica.; HALOT, s.v. אַיָּלָה; BDB, s.v. אַיָּלָה
- contestedThe verse names trees. Repointing to elot yields "makes the terebinths writhe," which parallels the following colon about laying the forests bare and keeps the couplet within a single image.; Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59 (Continental Commentary); Peter C. Craigie, Psalms 1-50 (Word Biblical Commentary)