bamah

The single occurrence is the second בָּמָה of Ezekiel 20:29, where the naming formula וַיִּקָּרֵא שְׁמָהּ בָּמָה turns the cultic noun into a name. Walther Zimmerli (Ezekiel 1, Hermeneia, 1979, 412-417), Moshe Greenberg (Ezekiel 1-20, AB 22, 1983, 132-135, 369-371), and Daniel Block (The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 1-24, NICOT, 1997, 651-653) all read the line as a sarcastic pseudo-etymology rather than a genuine place-name etiology: the assonance of מָה, הַבָּמָה, and הַבָּאִים makes the institution condemn itself out of its own name. The Septuagint transliterates rather than renders (τί ἐστιν Αβαμα), and J. T. Whitney counts this among roughly nineteen distinct Greek treatments of the noun across the canon. The standard lexica file this occurrence under the ordinary cultic noun rather than as a separate lexeme, so the separate concordance number reflects lexicographic convention for a word used as a name, not a distinct word. The live etymological question about this noun, whether the cultic sense is continuous with the poetic construct plural בָּמֳתֵי or belongs to a homonymous lexeme, concerns the common word and not this naming use. Ezekiel's line sits at the end of a trajectory traced by K.-D. Schunck in which the term moves from neutral in the early monarchic narratives to pejorative in Jeremiah and Ezekiel.