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This is a rare word that pictures light returning to a downcast face. It always appears where someone is grieving and longs, however briefly, to look and feel cheerful again. Three of its four appearances are of this kind, and they clearly belong together: the line in Job 10:20 is almost a direct quotation of the plea in Psalm 39:13, so whatever the psalmist meant, Job means too.

The force of the word is best seen in Job 9:27, where it stands right beside the picture of "laying aside my sad face." To brighten in this sense is to drop the frown and put on a lighter expression. It is not settled contentment but a momentary recovery of cheer, and in Job it is bitterly ironic: he proposes to cheer up and then admits, a breath later, that his dread rushes back.

The nearest everyday word is "cheer up" or "brighten," and a good translation gets the reader most of the way there. What can be lost is the specific image of a face lifting and the fleeting, almost wishful quality of the relief, which is why translations vary between brighten, cheer up, take comfort, and recover. It is a close relative of the ordinary word for gladness (שָׂמַח), but narrower: not general rejoicing so much as a downcast look brightening.

The same word takes on a violent coloring in its one remaining appearance, Amos 5:9, where God is the one who makes ruin "flash forth" against those who seem too strong to fall. The underlying idea is the same as in the other sense, a sudden shining or breaking out, but here it is causative and destructive: disaster bursting out all at once, the way dawn or lightning breaks over the sky.

This single line is one of the most argued half-verses in the prophets, and the ancient translators plainly did not know what to do with it, guessing at "divide," "smile," and "strengthen" in turn. The reading followed here, that God causes destruction to flash out against the strong, fits the surrounding imagery of fortresses and mighty men and is the choice of nearly every modern commentary. Because it rests on so little, though, a reader should treat the exact sense of this verse as genuinely open, and the details are laid out in the note and the scholarly discussion below.