cleft: mountains that look cut apart, split by ravines, either described that way or named for it
This word turns up exactly once in the Hebrew Bible, in the closing line of a love poem, where the woman tells the man to turn and be like a gazelle or a young stag on "the mountains of Bether" (Song of Songs 2:17). Almost everything we can say about it has to be worked out from its root, a verb meaning to cut something in two (בָּתַר). Applied to a landscape, that root gives the picture the oldest Greek translators saw in the verse: hills cut through, split, broken up by ravines.
Scholars read the phrase three ways.
- Most take the word as a description, so the man is being called across cleft, divided, rugged mountains, a reading that fits both the root and those early Greek translations.
- Some take it as the name of a real place, Bether, a low range southwest of Jerusalem that is still gazelle country, which would make the line a piece of local geography.
- A few older translations replace the word with "spices," copying the similar closing line at Song of Songs 8:14, a change nearly every recent scholar rejects.
The first two readings sit closer together than they look, because the place name itself very likely comes from the same root and would mean something like "the Cleft." So whether the poem is describing those hills or naming them, the scene is the same: broken, ravine-cut country lying between the woman and the man she is calling to her.