idols: the lifeless man-made objects that false worship treats as gods, named with open contempt
TranslatabilityPartialCertaintySettled
This is one of the Old Testament's harshest words for an idol. It never describes a real god or a neutral religious image. It always points to the carved or cast objects that people bow to instead of the LORD, and it does so with built-in scorn.
The scorn is in the very sound of the word. It is shaped to echo the word for dung-pellets, the small round droppings of sheep or goats. So calling an idol by this name is roughly like calling it a piece of filth. Some translators capture the bite with renderings like "dung-idols" or "filthy idols," while most settle for plain "idols." Either way the point is the same: the thing people are trusting is worthless and disgusting.
The word belongs especially to the prophet Ezekiel, who uses it more than thirty times, and it also runs through the books of Kings and Leviticus. Across all of these it carries a single charge: idols defile the people who serve them, and God's answer is to sweep the idols away and cleanse his people from them. Because the meaning holds steady everywhere it appears, this is treated as a single sense rather than split into shades.
A crude term of disgust, treating idols as filth to be smashed and heaped on the corpses of their worshipers, fit only for ruin and defilement.Lev 26:30Ezk 6:4Ezk 6:5
Names the idols a nation actively pursues and clings to in its unfaithfulness, so that worshiping them is spoken of as defiling oneself.Ezk 20:7Ezk 20:18Ezk 36:18
The signature word of Ezekiel and the historical accounts of Israel's and Judah's apostasy, marking the idols whose worship brought down judgment.2Ki 17:121Ki 21:26Ezk 14:3
Both
Both are contemptuous names for false gods, and a single oracle can sweep them together when announcing that the LORD will wipe out a land's idols.Ezk 30:13
Brands the idol as a powerless nothing, a worthless non-entity that cannot help anyone, set against the living God who made the heavens.Psa 96:51Ch 16:26
Mocks the idol as a man-made thing of metal and wood that people bow to, the work of their own fingers, with no breath or life in it.Isa 2:8Isa 31:7Hab 2:18
Extends as an insult beyond idols to anything useless or empty, such as physicians who are no help or a shepherd who abandons the flock.Job 13:4Zec 11:17
פֶּסֶלthe neutral term for a carved image as a manufactured object, with none of the contempt this word carries
A scornful, almost vulgar label for idols rather than a neutral word for an image: the prophets pile it on to express disgust, and it clusters thick in Ezekiel and the histories of Israel's apostasy.Ezk 6:4Ezk 14:32Ki 17:12
Names the idols as a source of defilement that pollutes the worshiper and the land, the focus falling on the spiritual filth they cause rather than on how they were made.Ezk 20:7Ezk 36:25Ezk 37:23
Almost always appears in the plural as a whole class of false gods Israel chased after, not a single named cult object.Lev 26:30Deu 29:17Jer 50:2
Both
Both name a physical idol-object of false worship whose presence brings covenant judgment, so both stand under the same condemnation.Lev 26:30Deu 27:15
Points to the physical image as something carved or cut into shape, so it shows up exactly where the text describes the craftsman shaping it from wood or stone.Isa 44:15Isa 40:20Isa 44:9
It is the very thing the second commandment forbids making, the carved likeness banned because no form can represent God.Exo 20:4Deu 5:8Deu 4:16
Used for a specific manufactured image a person commissions and sets up, traceable to its maker and its silver.Jdg 17:3Jdg 18:14Deu 27:15
שִׁקּוּץa detestable, abhorrent thing, often paired with this word; both express revulsion, but this one specifically likens the idol to dung
This is the word for what people actually give themselves to, so it takes the language of devotion: they serve these things, stray after them, lift their eyes to them, and carry them around in their hearts.2Ki 17:12Ezk 44:10Ezk 18:6Ezk 14:3Ezk 33:25
It contaminates the worshipper, not just the site. People are said to make themselves filthy with these things, to pollute the land with them, and to need washing before they are clean again.Ezk 20:7Ezk 36:18Ezk 36:25Ezk 37:23
It is a blanket word with no fixed shape behind it, stretching to cover objects of any material and the gods of any nation: wood, stone, silver and gold, figures scratched on a wall, the gods of Babylon, the gods of Egypt.Deu 29:17Ezk 8:10Jer 50:2Ezk 30:13
It carries open disgust, and the writers pile it together with their other words of loathing, things rendered "detestable things" and "abominations", rather than using it as a neutral label.Deu 29:172Ki 23:24Ezk 16:36
Both
Both belong to the same worship sites, and when God announces that he will level those sites the two go down together in one sentence: the high places wrecked, the one chopped down, the other smashed.Lev 26:30Ezk 6:4Ezk 6:6
In these speeches both are charged to the hearers as their own property, "your" altars and "your" idols, so the accusation lands on Israel's worship rather than on some foreign nation's.Lev 26:30Ezk 6:6
This names one particular fixture that stands at a worship site, itemized alongside the other installations there: the high places, the altars, and the wooden poles set up beside them.2Ch 14:52Ch 34:4Isa 17:8
It is only ever a manufactured object, something human hands put up and human hands take down, so the text has people build it, remove it, and chop it down, never follow it or bow to it.2Ch 34:7Isa 17:82Ch 14:5
Its position is physical and specific: it is described as standing up above the altars it belongs to, and it is paired with the wooden poles almost every time it appears.2Ch 34:42Ch 34:7Isa 27:9
Points to the idol as a manufactured thing, silver and gold shaped by human hands.Psa 115:4Psa 135:15
Names the physical images of foreign nations as objects that are captured, carried off, or hauled about.2Sa 5:211Sa 31:9Isa 46:1
gillul in the other biblical languages
εἴδωλονGreek“idol”the standard Greek word for an idol that the Septuagint frequently uses to render this Hebrew word, though the Greek term lacks the built-in coarseness
Only the Hebrew word is on the receiving end of God's demolition, with the bodies of the worshippers left lying on the wreckage: God promises to throw Israel's corpses onto the corpses of their idols, and to scatter the slain in front of them at their own altars.Lev 26:30Ezk 6:4Ezk 6:5
Only the Hebrew word is placed inside a person rather than on a pedestal. Ezekiel is told that the elders sitting in front of him have set their idols up in their own hearts, so the sin is diagnosed as an inward attachment that the men are carrying with them even when they come to ask God a question.Ezk 14:3Ezk 14:4Ezk 14:7
Only the Hebrew word keeps company with the language of filth and washing, which is why English versions sometimes reach for "filthy idols": people are told not to make themselves dirty with them, they are called polluted by them, and God promises to sprinkle clean water and wash his people clean of them.Ezk 20:7Ezk 23:30Ezk 36:25
Only the Hebrew word carries a national verdict on centuries of history: it names the reason the northern kingdom fell and the reason Judah followed, and it names what the reforming kings hauled out of the land.2Ki 17:122Ki 21:111Ki 15:12Ezk 36:18
Both
Both are blanket words of contempt for the man-made gods of the surrounding nations, and both are content to name them by the stuff they are made of. Israel is told it has seen the nations' idols of "wood and stone, silver and gold", and Revelation lists idols of gold, silver, bronze, stone and wood in the same dismissive way.Deu 29:17Rev 9:20
Both stand on the far side of a straight either or with the true God, and both are what a person is called to walk away from: Ezekiel's hearers are told to turn back and turn away from their idols, and Paul praises the Thessalonians for turning to God from idols to serve the living God, since God's own dwelling and idols share nothing.Ezk 14:61Th 1:92Co 6:16
Both are treated as a defilement a person has to be kept clear of, not merely a mistaken opinion to be corrected: Israel is warned not to make itself unclean with the idols of Egypt, and John's last line to his readers is simply to keep themselves from idols.Ezk 20:71Jn 5:21
Only the Greek word is argued out of existence. Paul grants the plain fact that "an idol is nothing in the world" and asks straight out whether the idol is anything at all, so the object is dismissed as empty rather than treated as a real rival to be smashed.1Co 8:41Co 10:19
Only the Greek word shows up in a practical question about the dinner table: what to do with meat that has been offered to an idol, and how to protect someone whose conscience is still troubled by eating it. The problem is daily social life in a city full of shrines, not a shrine on a hilltop.1Co 8:7Act 15:20
Only the Greek word describes the past of people who were never Israelites: Paul reminds the Corinthians that as outsiders they used to be swept along to idols that cannot speak, which sets their old silence against the Spirit who now gives them words.1Co 12:2
Only the Greek word is paired with demons as the actual power at work behind the images, so worshipping the gold, silver, bronze, stone and wooden objects is at the same moment worshipping something spiritual and hostile.Rev 9:20
Only the Greek word is used against people who are proud of hating idols: Paul turns their disgust into the ground of the charge by asking the man who loathes idols whether he robs temples.Rom 2:22
What scholars say about gillul
Standard lexica (HALOT, BDB, DCH) treat גִּלּוּל as a single contemptuous designation for idols, with no semantic split; its 48 occurrences cluster heavily in Ezekiel (about 39), with the remainder in Leviticus 26, Deuteronomy 29, Kings, and Jeremiah 50:2. The dominant etymological view, going back to scholars cited in TDOT and TWOT, derives the word from the root גלל / the noun גֵּל "dung" (cf. גָּלָל, dung-pellets), with the qittul vocalization plausibly modeled on opprobrious formations such as שִׁקּוּץ "detestable thing," so the form itself encodes revulsion (the "Mistkugeln" / dung-pellets characterization is associated with W. Zimmerli's Ezekiel commentary). A minority links it instead to גָּלַל in the sense of round stone objects or rolled/log-shaped images, treating the dung association as later wordplay rather than the original derivation. Either way the contemptuous force in usage is undisputed.
Sources
HALOT, s.v. גִּלּוּלlexicon
BDB, s.v. גִּלּוּלlexicon
DCH, vol. 2, s.v. גִּלּוּלlexicon
H. D. Preuss, "גִּלּוּלִים gillûlîm," in TDOT, vol. 3theological-dictionary