StrongerBible

daḥah

דָּחָה

HebrewH1760push, cast down, ...

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Psa 35:5Psa 36:12(13)Psa 62:3(4)Psa 118:13 (2×)Psa 140:4(5)Pro 14:32Jer 23:12
Root family
Word studydah-KHAHverb

What daḥah means

to shove hard: to push a person or thing over so that it goes down

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

The picture is physical and simple. Someone plants a hand and pushes, hard enough that whoever takes the shove is already on the way to the ground. Psalm 118:13 shows it at full strength, an attacker pushing the speaker so violently that he was falling when help reached him. Every other use in the Bible grows out of that one gesture.

Because a shove like that ends in a fall, the word became a way of talking about ruin. The same push keeps turning up as a picture of someone finished off:

  • the evildoers lie where they fell, pushed down and unable to get up (Psalm 36:12)
  • the wicked man is knocked flat by his own wrongdoing (Proverbs 14:32)
  • prophets walking a dark and slippery road are shoved, and down they go (Jeremiah 23:12)

Two uses stretch the picture in other directions. In Psalm 35:5 the pushing is a rout rather than a topple: the enemies scatter like chaff in the wind with the angel of the LORD driving them on from behind. In Psalm 62:3 the word describes a thing instead of a person, a garden wall that has already been shoved and needs only one more push to come down, which is what the psalmist says his enemies will amount to.

The verb is rare, eight uses in seven verses, and five of those verses are in the Psalms. It belongs to the vocabulary of enemies and of God bringing someone down, and it names the push rather than the fall; where the falling matters, the sentence usually says so with a second word.

Nuances

1ato shove someone hard, meaning to bring them down
TranslatabilityDirect
Psa 118:13 (2×)Psa 140:4(5)
1bto be knocked down and left down: to come to ruin
Psa 36:12(13)Pro 14:32Jer 23:12
1cto drive someone away, pushing them along as they flee
Psa 35:5
1dalready shoved and ready to topple, said of a wall or a fence
Psa 62:3(4)

What scholars say about daḥah

The lexica agree on the sense. BDB glosses the verb "push, thrust," and the range it maps is the one the occurrences show: an assailant's shove (Psa 118:13; 140:4), a participle of driving an enemy along in flight (Psa 35:5), a passive participle describing a wall or fence that has been pushed in (Psa 62:3), and the passive forms used of the wicked being brought down (Psa 36:12; Prov 14:32; Jer 23:12). HALOT and DCH cover the same distribution, and TWOT treats the verb as pushing with the characteristic result that the object falls.

The one point on which the lexica diverge is derivational rather than semantic: whether the geminate forms belong to a byform דחח standing alongside דחה. STEPBible's lexicon keeps both headwords under the single Strong's number, which is the treatment followed here; no lexicon assigns the two a different meaning, so the split affects the etymology rather than the gloss. Supporting evidence for the fall as the verb's characteristic goal is the derived noun דְּחִי "a stumbling, a fall" (Psa 56:13; 116:8) and the construction in Psa 140:4, where the object is פְּעָמַי, the speaker's steps.

Commentators debate the syntax of Prov 14:32a, where the wicked is thrust down בְּרָעָתוֹ, either by his own evil or in the midst of it, and whether the Septuagint's reading of the second colon reflects a different Hebrew text. Neither question touches the meaning of the verb. In the Septuagint the verb is regularly rendered by ὠθέω and its compounds, most often ἀπωθέω, which remains the closest Greek counterpart.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. דָּחָהlexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. דחהlexicon
  • DCH, s.v. דחהlexicon
  • TWOT, s.v. דָּחָהdictionary
  • H.-J. Kraus, Psalms 60-150: A Continental Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993)commentary
  • B. K. Waltke, The Book of Proverbs: Chapters 1-15 (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004)commentary
  • W. McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, vol. 1 (ICC; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986)commentary

All attested forms of דָּחָה

niphal imperfect 3mp

יִדַּחוּ

Jer 23:12

niphal imperfect 3ms

יִדָּחֶה

Pro 14:32

pual perfect 3cp

דֹּחוּ

Psa 36:12

qal infinitive-absolute absolute

דַּחֹה

Psa 118:13

qal infinitive-construct construct

דְחוֹת

Psa 140:4

qal participle m s absolute

דּוֹחֶה

Psa 35:5

qal passive-participle f s absolute

דְּחוּיָה

Psa 62:3

qal perfect 2ms

דְחִיתַ

Psa 118:13