a latticed opening: a framed or slatted hole made in a solid surface so that one particular thing can pass through it
This is not the ordinary Hebrew word for a window. Hebrew already had that one (חַלּוֹן), the plain hole in a house wall that people looked out of, let spies down through, and threw things from. This word names something narrower: an opening that is framed, grated, or slatted, made so that one specific thing can get through it. What matters in every case is what passes through, not the opening itself.
That one picture covers all nine appearances:
- smoke escaping from a hearth through a slit high in a wall
- doves coming home through the small holes of their nesting wall
- an aging person's failing sight, framed by the eyes as if by lattices
- rain, ruin, and blessing coming down through openings in the sky
Six of the nine are about the sky, and together they trace one image being reused. Ancient readers pictured the sky as a solid expanse with water held above it, and these openings as the way that water came down. In the flood account God opens them and later shuts them again. A mocking officer in besieged Samaria says that even if God made openings in the sky there could not be food by morning. Isaiah pictures the end of the world as those same openings coming open all over again. Then Malachi turns the whole image around: God promises to open them and pour out blessing until there is no room left to hold it.
Because the word describes a kind of opening rather than a fixed object, English versions reach for a different word almost every time it appears. That variety is a feature of the translations, not of the Hebrew.
Nuances
Whether the openings in the sky named in Genesis 7:11 and 8:2, and in the other sky passages (2 Kings 7:2, 19; Isaiah 24:18; Malachi 3:10), were understood as real apertures in a solid sky holding water above it, or as figurative language.
- majorityThe writers inherited the wider ancient picture of a solid expanse with water stored above it, and these are real openings in it, though what any given passage asserts is God's command of the water rather than a description of how the sky is built.; P. H. Seely, "The Firmament and the Water Above," WTJ 53 (1991): 227-40 and WTJ 54 (1992): 31-46; L. I. J. Stadelmann, The Hebrew Conception of the World (AnBib 39; Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1970), 56-58, 115-17; W. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (MC 8; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 243-67; B. F. Batto, Slaying the Dragon (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), 41-52, 78-85; J. H. Walton, Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 155-61; N. M. Sarna, Genesis (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), 48, 85
- minorityThe Hebrew does not require a solid sky, and uses such as the promise of poured out blessing in Malachi and the grain of 2 Kings 7 show the openings are a figure of speech.; R. W. Younker and R. M. Davidson, "The Myth of the Solid Heavenly Dome," Andrews University Seminary Studies 49/1 (2011): 125-47; V. S. Poythress, "Rain Water Versus a Heavenly Sea in Genesis 1:6-8," WTJ 77 (2015): 181-91
What the openings in Ecclesiastes 12:3 refer to: the latticed windows of a house, or the eyes of an aging person.
- majorityThe line is a figure for failing eyesight, the openings being the frame of the eye itself.; BDB, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 70, s.v. ארב (following Hitzig and Nowack); T. Longman III, The Book of Ecclesiastes (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 269-72; R. E. Murphy, Ecclesiastes (WBC 23A; Dallas: Word, 1992), 118-20; J. L. Crenshaw, Ecclesiastes (OTL; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), 184-87; M. V. Fox, A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 333-34, 349
- minorityThe household scene of women looking out through lattices is retained alongside the reading about the eyes, so both layers stand together rather than one replacing the other.; C.-L. Seow, Ecclesiastes (AB 18C; New York: Doubleday, 1997), 351-58