a damaging report spread about someone or something, told in a way meant to turn others against them.
This word never carries good news. Whenever it appears, someone's name is being damaged by what is being said, and the damage is the point. English has no single word for it because it holds three things together at once: the act of putting a report about, the talk itself, and the ruined name left behind.
The Bible uses it in three recognizable situations.
- Someone deliberately puts a report into circulation, as the scouts do when they talk Israel out of entering the land.
- Someone finds himself ringed by talk he cannot stop, which is how both the psalmist and Jeremiah describe their enemies.
- Someone is left with a name he cannot clear, the warning behind the proverb about giving away a friend's secret.
The hardest question the word raises is whether the report has to be false. In the wilderness story the answer is plain enough: God treats the scouts' account of the land as a lie and punishes the men who spread it. But this is not the ordinary word for a lie (שֶׁקֶר), and it is not the neutral word for news or a report either (שְׁמוּעָה). What it always insists on is that the talk is hostile and that it costs its target something. Genesis 37:2, where Joseph brings a report about his brothers to their father, is the test case, and the Hebrew leaves the question open.
It is a word for whispering campaigns rather than open accusation. Twice, in Psalm 31:13 and Jeremiah 20:10, the same phrase describes the murmur of many voices at once, and both times it comes attached to the cry "terror on every side."