dallah

Behind this word sits one simple picture: something that hangs down slack. Hebrew has a verb for hanging low, drooping, and running dry (דלל), and this noun names the thing that hangs.

That is why one short word can cover two scenes that look unrelated at first:

• a woman's hair worn down and falling from her head, praised for its deep color
• the warp threads still fastened to a loom, which the weaver cuts the finished cloth free of

Hezekiah reaches for the second image when he thinks he is dying: his life is being cut away from the loom while the weaving is only half done.

Hebrew already has a plain, general word for hair as a substance (שער), the sort that grows anywhere on a body. This word is narrower and more visual. It names hair as something that hangs, which is exactly why the same word can serve for threads on a loom without any strain at all.

This is a collective word. It does not describe one poor person but a whole bottom layer of a country, taken together. The related adjective (דל) is what you call a single low, weak, or hard up individual; this noun is what you call the people at the bottom as a class.

Almost every use comes from one historical moment. When Babylon emptied Jerusalem, the officials, the fighting men, and the skilled craftsmen were marched away, and the accounts note that nobody was left except the poorest of the land. The same Babylonian commander then handed those people vineyards and fields to work. The writers never spell out the irony, but it is there: the ones an empire judged not worth taking ended up holding the ground.

One older use keeps the physical edge the whole word family starts from. In Pharaoh's dream the second set of cows comes up thin and wasted, and the word describes their bodies, not their property. Underneath all of it is the same idea: not so much having nothing as being less, drawn down, reduced.