to be like something, or to treat one thing as like another: to resemble, to liken or compare, and so to picture in the mind, imagine, or plan
This verb turns on one simple act: setting two things side by side and seeing them as alike. Everything else it does grows out of that.
At its plainest it just reports a likeness. A person is like a passing breath, a lover is like a gazelle, a lonely sufferer is like a desert bird, a spared city is like Sodom, and no tree in the garden of God was like the great cedar. Push the same verb one step further and it becomes something a speaker does on purpose: holding two things up together and calling them a match. That is the move behind the prophetic challenge "To whom will you liken God?", where the point is not what God looks like but that nothing at all can be set beside him.
The same motion also happens out of sight, inside the head. To hold a picture of something that is not yet real is to imagine or suppose it, and to hold a picture of what you mean to do is to plan or intend it. So Esther is warned not to imagine that she will escape, an invading king does not intend what God intends, and the men of Gibeah meant to kill. One use turns the comparison back on the speaker: the boasting king in Isaiah says he will make himself like the Most High, claiming God's own level.
Hebrew has other ways to say that things match, and this verb sits among them rather than covering the whole field:
- one verb puts two things on the same level, equal in worth or measure (שָׁוָה)
- another lays things out in order so they can be weighed against each other (עָרַךְ)
- another coins the proverb or byword that carries a comparison (מָשָׁל)
- another is about reckoning and scheming rather than picturing (חָשַׁב)
Isaiah 46:5 stacks three of these in one line, and because the uses shade into one another rather than standing apart, a few verses can be read in more than one way and English versions differ.
Nuances
Whether the verb in Jeremiah 6:2 belongs to the likeness verb or to the identically spelled verb meaning to cease, be cut off, or be destroyed.
- majorityThe verb belongs to the destruction root, so the line announces that the Lord will destroy the daughter of Zion. The judgment context of the surrounding oracle favors this reading, and it is the one most modern versions follow.; BDB, s.v. II [דָּמָה] ("cease, cause to cease, cut off, destroy"), citing Jeremiah 6:2
- minorityThe verb belongs to the likeness root, so the line compares the daughter of Zion to a lovely and delicate woman, or, on a further proposal, to a luxuriant pasture. This is the older translation tradition and remains a live option because the verse as a whole is difficult and its imagery is comparative.