bekhi

This word names weeping itself, the tears and the crying voice that break out when grief takes over. It is something you can hear across a room. When Joseph finally told his brothers who he was, he wept so loudly that the Egyptians heard it, and when the foundation of the second temple was laid, the sound of the people's weeping carried so far that no one could tell it apart from the shouts of joy.

Most often the tears are for loss: a nation mourning its dead, a mother refusing to be comforted for her children, a ruined city echoing with cries. But the very same weeping is also turned toward God. The prophets call the people to come back to him with fasting and weeping, and the Psalms are confident that God hears the sound of a person's tears. In the Bible weeping is rarely private and almost never pointless. It is sorrow made loud enough to be heard, and it expects an answer.

In one difficult line of Job, this same set of letters seems to describe not human tears but water, the trickling or seeping of streams that God holds in check as he lays bare hidden things underground. Many modern scholars think the text here should be read slightly differently, as the sources or springs of the rivers rather than their weeping. Because the verse is hard and this sense appears nowhere else, the meaning is genuinely uncertain, and it is set apart here so it does not blur the ordinary picture of the word as human weeping.