dalal

The standard lexicons treat this verb as a single root whose concrete image is something hanging slack or low, from which the senses of dwindling, languishing, and being reduced all derive. BDB glosses it "hang, be low, languish" and gathers the mining scene of Job 28:4, the drying canals of Isaiah 19:6, the failing eyes of Isaiah 38:14, and the humbled nation of Judges 6:6 under one entry; HALOT, DCH, and the eighteenth edition of Gesenius keep substantially the same arrangement. Heinz-Josef Fabry's TDOT article on the דלל family reads the root as a psychosomatic image of slackness that fans out into physical, social, economic, and legal uses, and no major lexicon posits an independent homonym for the physical uses. The verb underlies the far more frequent adjective דַּל and, on the mainstream reading, דַּלָּה (loom thrum, hanging hair) and דָּלִית (a vine tendril). Comparative Semitic evidence connects it with Akkadian dalalu B, "to be(come) small, lowly," and the adjective dallu; the Arabic root that matches semantically, dhalla "be humbled," is the wrong cognate by the regular sound correspondences, which point instead to dalla "dangle, swing." Two occurrences remain difficult. At Job 28:4 interpreters divide over whether the subject is miners dangling on ropes (so Clines and most modern versions) or waters that dwindle away (so several older renderings). At Proverbs 26:7 the form is irregular for a doubled root and is discussed in relation to the verb "to draw up," though on either derivation the resulting sense, of legs hanging slack, is much the same.