appiryon

This word appears only once in the whole Hebrew Bible, in a wedding poem where King Solomon makes the object out of cedar from Lebanon, fitting it with pillars of silver, a base of gold, and a seat of purple cloth. Because it is used just this once, its exact meaning has to be reconstructed from that single scene, and scholars have never fully agreed on what it pictures.

Most read it as a splendid royal litter: a covered chair or bed carried on poles, the kind of conveyance a king or a bride would ride in a grand procession. Every ancient translation understood it as something carried rather than a building, and by the rabbinic period the word had settled into meaning the curtained litter, and later the canopy, used to bring a bride to her wedding, a sense it keeps in modern Hebrew. A serious minority of scholars, though, take the passage to describe a fixed royal pavilion or bridal bower, a stationary structure like the jeweled pavilion of the Persian king in the book of Esther.

The word's origin is a famous puzzle. It has been traced to Greek, Sanskrit, Old Persian, Egyptian, and Hebrew roots, with no agreement among them. This matters because if it were borrowed from Greek, some have argued the Song must have been written late, in the centuries after Alexander the Great. But that argument has steadily lost force, since the other proposed origins point to earlier periods and none of them can be proven from a single word. The safest renderings, palanquin or litter, follow the ancient translations without pretending to settle the puzzle.