ballahah

Nine of this word's ten appearances are plural, and the plural is the key to it. It does not name a private mood but a band of horrors that arrive together and go to work on someone. In Job they are the agents of a man's undoing: they startle him from every side, they overtake him like a flood, they drive him out of his own tent and hand him on to death.

What holds all its uses together is where they end. Terror here is never a fright a person recovers from; it is nearly the last thing said about someone before he is gone:

• in Job the terrors chase a man from his tent to the grave
• in Isaiah terror comes at nightfall and by morning the enemy is not there
• in Ezekiel a great trading city becomes a horror, and then it is no more, forever

Ezekiel turns the word inside out. Tyre and its king are not the ones feeling the terror; they are made into it. Sailors and merchants stare and hiss, and the city itself is now the horror they are looking at. Translators split here, some keeping "a terror" or "a horror" and others reading the phrase as the dreadful end the city was brought to. The two readings are hard to prise apart, because in this word the horror and the ruin that causes it come as one thing.

Hebrew has commoner words for fear: the dread that grips a person on the spot (פַּחַד), and the dread God sends falling on an enemy army so that it cannot fight (אֵימָה). This one is rare and heavy, at home in Job's speeches about the death of the wicked and in prophecies of a city's end. Ezekiel also uses a rare word for the terror a nation strikes into its neighbors (חִתִּית), which stands close to what this word does in his oracles against Tyre.