a latticed window: the slatted screen or low railing set in a window opening, which a person looks out through
Both times this word appears, the writer has just used the ordinary Hebrew word for a window (חַלּוֹן) in the line before, then reaches for this rarer word in the matching line. Most modern dictionaries read that second line as sharpening the first rather than simply repeating it: from the opening in the wall to the screen set inside it, the bars a face is framed by. Translations that print "window" both times hide the move, while the older renderings "lattice" and "casement" keep it.
What the word names is a real piece of building. In both verses the watcher is looking down from an upper floor onto the street below, which fits a kind of window well known from Iron Age houses in the region: a grille of wooden slats, or a railing of small columns across the lower half of a high opening, so that someone inside could look out without being clearly seen. The ancient translators worked to keep that precision:
- the Latin chose its word for a grille of small bars
- the Aramaic version read "from between the laths"
- one Greek tradition has "through the latticework," another "out of the arrow slit"
A picture travels with the word. Carved ivory panels dug up at Nimrud, Arslan Tash, Khorsabad, and Samaria all show the same scene: a woman's face set in a recessed window above a low railing of little pillars. Many scholars think both biblical verses lean on that familiar image. In the Song of Deborah the effect is bitter, since Sisera's mother waits at her lattice in the pose of a queen watching for her son's chariots while the reader already knows he is dead in a nomad's tent. In Proverbs the teacher takes the watcher's place himself and sees a young man walking to his ruin, and the old Greek translation of that verse put the seductress at the window instead.
One further use of the word survives outside the Hebrew Bible, in the Jewish book of Sirach, where a father is warned not to give his daughter a lattice that overlooks the entrance of the house. Written centuries later, that line confirms both the architecture and the social weight the word carries: this is the opening through which a person is seen.
Disputed
Whether אֶשְׁנָב names specifically a latticed grille, narrowing the חַלּוֹן of the preceding colon, or is simply a poetic synonym for "window."
- majorityThe word specifies and intensifies the preceding term: it denotes the lattice, slatted screen, or balustraded aperture set within the wider window opening, which is why the ancient versions reached for technical renderings (Jerome's cancelli, Targum Jonathan's סוֹרְגַיָּא, the Judges A-text's δικτυωτῆς) and why Ben Sira 42:11 uses it of a specific lookout over the house entrance.; Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, p. 79, s.v. אֶשְׁנָב; Koehler, Baumgartner, and Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. אֶשְׁנָב; Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. אֶשְׁנָב; Waltke, The Book of Proverbs 1-15, NICOT, on Proverbs 7:6; Yeivin, "אשנב," Leshonenu 23 (1959)
- minorityThe pair is ordinary synonymous parallelism: both terms mean "window," and no narrowing of sense should be pressed out of the second colon.; Rashi, commentary on Judges 5:28; Kimhi (Radak), Sefer ha-Shorashim, s.v. אשנב; Ibn Janah, Kitab al-Usul, s.v. אשנב