StrongerBible

alam

אָלַם

HebrewH0481“dumb, silent, ...”

Appears 9 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Gen 37:7Psa 31:18(19)Psa 39:2(3)Psa 39:9(10)Isa 53:7Ezk 3:26Ezk 24:27Ezk 33:22Dan 10:15
Word studyah-LAHMverb

What alam means

1

to be speechless: to have the mouth shut so that no words come out, whether struck mute or refusing to open it

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The picture behind this word is a mouth that will not open. Hebrew has several words for quiet, and most of them describe a sound that stops or a person who stays still. This one keeps its eye on the mouth itself: nearly every verse that uses it also mentions a mouth, a tongue, or a pair of lips, and the silence it names is the failure of words to come out.

That single image covers what look at first like opposite situations:

  • God shuts a prophet's mouth so that he cannot answer his hearers (Ezekiel 3:26).
  • A man is left with nothing to say after a vision too heavy to answer (Daniel 10:15).
  • A sufferer clamps his mouth shut on purpose rather than complain (Psalm 39:9).
  • A worshipper prays that his slanderers' lying lips be stopped (Psalm 31:18).
  • A sheep makes no sound while it is being sheared (Isaiah 53:7).

What holds these together is that the silence always happens in front of someone: God, a hostile crowd, a shearer. It is a posture in a relationship rather than a mood, which is why one word can describe a punishment, a submission, and a prayer for justice without straining.

The neighboring words are worth keeping apart. Holding your peace (חָשָׁה) is about withholding speech you could have given; being still (דָּמַם) can reach past speech to stopping altogether; and saying nothing when a word was expected (חָרֵשׁ) is the everyday word for letting a matter drop. A person who cannot speak at all is named by the matching word from this same family (אִלֵּם).

Nuances

1ato lose the power of speech: a mouth stopped from outside, by God's hand or by an encounter too overwhelming to answer
Ezk 3:26Ezk 24:27Ezk 33:22Dan 10:15
1bto keep the mouth shut: to say nothing rather than protest, complain, or answer back
TranslatabilityDirect
Psa 39:2(3)Psa 39:9(10)Isa 53:7
1cto be struck silent: lips that were speaking wrongly are stopped, as a matter of justice
Psa 31:18(19)
2

to bind cut grain into sheaves

TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled

This use turns up once, in Joseph's dream of the harvest field, where he and his brothers are tying cut grain into bundles (Genesis 37:7). The verb stands right beside the noun for a bundle of grain (אֲלֻמָּה), so the Hebrew line has a chime in it that English cannot copy, something close to "sheaving sheaves."

Whether this is the same word as the one meaning "to be speechless" or a lookalike that happens to be spelled the same way is an old question. The bundling sense is built on the noun for a sheaf, and some have joined the two by the idea of tying something fast, a tongue as easily as a stalk of grain. Nothing in the dream plays on silence, so that link is best held as a possibility about where the word came from and not as a key to the passage.

Gen 37:7

What scholars say about alam

The lexica gloss the Niphal uniformly as "be dumb, speechless, silent" (BDB; HALOT; DCH), with Psalm 31:19 (English 31:18) noted as the one instance whose grammatical subject is lips rather than a person. BDB connects the sense of speechlessness with the idea of being bound, and the Piel participle in Genesis 37:7 is standardly taken as denominative from אֲלֻמָּה "sheaf"; whether the two uses reflect one root or homonyms is not settled, and nothing in the biblical usage decides it. The prophetic dumbness of Ezekiel 3:26; 24:27; 33:22 has produced a large discussion, treated at length in the major commentaries (Zimmerli, Greenberg, Block), over whether Ezekiel was mute throughout the years before Jerusalem's fall, mute only toward his own people, or mute in the intervals between oracles; that debate concerns the nature of the sign rather than the meaning of the verb. On the two Psalm 39 occurrences Kraus reads the silence as a vow of restraint under discipline, and on Isaiah 53:7 Blenkinsopp takes the simile as non protest rather than incapacity.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. אָלַםlexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. אלםlexicon
  • DCH, s.v. אלםlexicon
  • Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1 (Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), on Ezek 3:22-27commentary
  • Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Anchor Bible 22; Garden City: Doubleday, 1983), on Ezek 3:26commentary
  • Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1-24 (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), on Ezek 3:26 and 24:27commentary
  • Hans-Joachim Kraus, Psalms 1-59 (Continental Commentary; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), on Ps 39commentary
  • Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 40-55 (Anchor Bible 19A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), on Isa 53:7commentary
  • Claus Westermann, Genesis 37-50 (Continental Commentary; Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1986), on Gen 37:7commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of אָלַם

niphal perfect 1cs

נֶאֱלַמְתִּי

Psa 39:2, Psa 39:9, Ezk 33:22

niphal consecutive-perfect 1cs

וְנֶאֱלָמְתִּי

Dan 10:15

niphal consecutive-perfect 2ms

וְנֶאֱלַמְתָּ

Ezk 3:26

niphal imperfect 2ms

תֵאָלֵם

Ezk 24:27

niphal imperfect 3fp

תֵּאָלַמְנָה

Psa 31:18

niphal perfect 3fs

נֶאֱלָמָה

Isa 53:7

piel participle m p absolute

מְאַלְּמִים

Gen 37:7