ga'on

The picture behind this word is something rising up: water swelling, a plant growing tall, a person lifting themselves high. When that height truly belongs to God, it is majesty, and the Bible reaches for this word again and again to say so. He rises up in the sea and shatters Pharaoh's army by the greatness of it. His voice thunders in it. One whole passage in Isaiah repeats three times that people will hide in caves from the splendor of his majesty when he rises to shake the earth, and a promised future shepherd of Israel is told he will lead the flock not in his own greatness but in the majesty of the LORD's name.

This is the same upward motion that, in a person, curdles into arrogance (the third meaning below). The difference is who is doing the rising. In God the height is simply true: he really is that great, so the word names glory. In a human being the height is a lie about how big he is, so the same word names pride. The Bible plays the two against each other on purpose, sometimes within the very same passage: God alone may be high, and the day of the LORD is the day every human height is brought down and his alone is left standing.

In one striking dare, God tells Job to clothe himself with majesty and grandeur, as if to say: take the thing only I can wear, and see whether you can run the world. Job cannot, and the point is made.

Here the height belongs not to God or to a proud heart but to a place or a thing: the eminence that makes a kingdom magnificent, a homeland glorious, a river awesome. Babylon is called the splendor of kingdoms, a restored Israel becomes an everlasting grandeur, and the land itself is named as the heritage God loves and chose for his people.

A special case is the dense, lush growth along the Jordan, which Hebrew describes with this same word: a swelling, or thicket. Older translations sometimes pictured floodwater here, but the setting fits something else better: more than one prophet pictures a lion coming up out of it against grazing flocks, which points to a wild, tangled riverside jungle rather than rising water. The same idea of something swollen and grand also sits under the surge of the sea, whose proud waves God tells to come no farther.

This splendor is morally neutral by itself. It can be a gift God gives or a treasure God strips away in judgment, and more than once the very glory a nation was known for is named here precisely as God takes it away.

This is the word's most common use, and its darkest. The rising that is glory in God becomes, in a human heart, a swelling that has no right to be there: arrogance, haughtiness, the conviction that one is bigger than one is. Proverbs names it plainly as something the LORD hates and as the very thing that walks just ahead of a fall.

The prophets aim it again and again at nations that strut: Moab's overflowing pride, the arrogance of Assyria and Babylon, the swagger of Israel itself, which becomes a witness against them in court. What God hates is not greatness but the counterfeit of it, a creature claiming the height that belongs to the Creator alone.

Because the cure is humbling, this arrogance is repeatedly the thing God promises to break. A fixed phrase, "the pride of your strength," becomes almost a refrain aimed at Judah's own temple and land as much as at Egypt's might, each time promising its end. The echo goes back to an old warning that if God's people broke faith, he would shatter the pride of their power himself: the point is not that strength is wrong, but that trusting the strength instead of the God who gave it is what brings it down.