gloom: darkness, in a rare word Hebrew poets use for the dark of the grave, of hidden violence, and of disaster
This is one of the Bible's words for darkness, and a rare one: it appears about nine times, always in poetry, and five of those are in Job. The everyday Hebrew word for darkness (חֹשֶׁךְ) turns up dozens of times in every kind of writing, from the opening lines of Genesis on. Reaching past that common word for this one is a little like choosing "gloom" over "dark" in English. The sense is much the same; the choice is deliberate, and the writing is lifted.
Where the word shows up tells you more than the word itself does. Its settings are the land of the dead, the deepest shafts miners dig, the night a sufferer wishes had never happened, the cover an archer shoots from, and the sightlessness God promises to end. That company is why the word feels heavier than a plain "dark." In Job's picture of the world of the dead it is stacked together with other darkness words, among them "deep shadow" (צַלְמָוֶת), not because each names a different grade of blackness but because heaping them up is how Hebrew poetry overwhelms.
From there the word moves easily from real dark to sheer disaster. Job's flattest use of it has no night in it at all: he hoped for light and got gloom, meaning he hoped for good and got ruin. Isaiah runs the same image the other way, promising that the gloom the blind live in is exactly what the coming age will take away.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether אֹפֶל denotes a thicker or deeper darkness than the ordinary word חֹשֶׁךְ, or is simply a rarer poetic word for the same thing.
- majorityIt is a rarer, poetic synonym rather than a stronger grade of darkness. The four darkness terms heaped up at Job 10:21-22 (חֹשֶׁךְ, צַלְמָוֶת, עֵיפָה, אֹפֶל) work by intensification and parallelism, not as a calibrated scale, and the deathly force felt in אֹפֶל comes from the contexts poets chose for it (Sheol, un-creation, calamity) rather than from a lexical feature. Isaiah 29:18 pairs it with חֹשֶׁךְ in plain synonymous parallelism.; Helmer Ringgren, "חשׁך", in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament; HALOT, s.v. אֹפֶל; David J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. אֹפֶל
- minorityThe noun denotes thick darkness specifically, the dark that falls once the sun has set, and Hebrew's darkness terms mark degrees of obscurity that English cannot match.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, s.v. אֹפֶל ("darkness, especially thick, a poet. word"); Albert Barnes, Notes on the Book of Job, at Job 10:22