gal

This is the word for stones gathered and stacked into a mound. Its root idea is rolling stones together into a pile, and across the narrative books that pile does real work. It seals an agreement, covers a body, or marks the wreckage of a city.

The senses below differ only in what the heap is for.

• A cairn set up between Jacob and Laban stands as a silent witness to their treaty.
• A heap thrown over the dead brands a grave with shame.
• When a prophet says a proud city will become a heap, he means it will be knocked down into a bare pile of rubble.

In every case the object is the same: stones rolled together into a mound.

Ancient readers would have recognized this heap as the everyday way people staked out boundaries and remembered the dead. Piled stones were a public, weatherproof record that could be seen and pointed to for generations.

In the poems and prophets the same word names the waves of the sea. It shows up only in the plural, and almost always where the power of the sea is in view. The picture is water rolling and heaving, and the writers use it to say something about God.

Often the waves are a threat. They rise over a drowning sufferer, or they stand for the hostile nations and the old idea of the sea as a chaos that only God can master. God:

• stirs them up and stills them
• sets a boundary they cannot cross
• turns them loose against proud powers like Babylon and Tyre

Because he controls the waves, the writers argue, he controls history and death itself.

Not every use is menacing. In one striking line, a prophet says that if the people had listened, their well-being would have flowed like a river and their right living would have rolled on like the waves of the sea. Here the endless swells picture inexhaustible supply rather than danger.

In one much-debated love poem the word may name a spring or pool, an enclosed source of water. The line calls the beloved a locked garden and a sealed spring, using enclosed water as an image of a love kept for one person alone.

This sense hangs on a single verse, and even there it is uncertain. The traditional Hebrew reads a word for a spring, but the oldest translations into Greek, Latin, and Syriac read a word for a garden instead, and modern versions split over which to follow. If the traditional text stands, this is the rarest use of the word, tied to the root idea of water welling up in a rounded basin. If not, the sense drops away entirely.