to be brought to an end and hushed: destroyed, cut off, or finished, and (of an activity) simply stopped.
This verb is about something reaching its end. Whatever it touches stops: a city is laid waste, a nation is wiped out, a king is swept away like a twig on the water, a man cries that he is finished, or a flood of tears finally lets up. English Bibles therefore render it "destroyed," "cut off," "undone," "perish," "brought to silence," or plainly "cease," depending on what is being brought to a halt.
Most often the ending is violent, and it comes with a hush. The prophets use the word for the fall of Moab's cities, of Ashkelon, of Samaria's king and of the traders of Jerusalem, and in Zephaniah it stands in the same breath as the ordinary word for being cut off (כָּרַת), which is a good clue to how the prophets heard it. Many scholars also tie it to the verb for falling quiet (דָּמַם), so the doomed are not merely knocked down but stilled, reduced to the silence of ruins and graves.
A gentler use turns the same idea on an activity rather than a life. When Jeremiah and the poet of Lamentations say their eyes will not stop, they mean the weeping runs on without a break. Here the word means only to let up, with nothing of destruction in it, and it comes close to the everyday word for leaving off work (שָׁבַת).
The hardest verses are the ones where wiped out and struck dumb pull against each other. Isaiah's "woe is me, for I am undone" may be a man who feels destroyed or a man whose mouth has been stopped in the presence of God's holiness, and the refrain of Psalm 49 may say that people perish like the animals or that they are as dumb as the animals. Both readings are old, and scholars have not settled them.
Nuances
How to read the last word of the Psalm 49 refrain, which says that a person in his splendor does not last and is like the beasts.
- majorityThey perish. The verb is the one that means being brought to an end, so the line says that people die as animals die.; BDB, s.v. II [דָּמָה] ("cease, cause to cease, cut off, destroy"); DCH, ed. D. J. A. Clines, vol. 2 (1995), s.v. דמה
- minorityThey are like dumb beasts. Taking the verb in its "be silent" sense, the line compares people to speechless animals rather than to dying ones.; HALOT, s.v. דמה II (p. 225), which distinguishes a verb meaning "be silent" from one meaning "destroy"
Whether Isaiah's cry says that he is ruined and undone or that he is struck dumb, silenced before the holiness of God.
- majorityHe is ruined, undone: a man who has seen the King and expects not to survive it. This is the destruction sense the verb carries across the prophets, and it is what nearly all modern versions print.; BDB, s.v. II [דָּמָה], listing Isaiah 6:5 under "be ruined, undone"; John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, on Isaiah 6:5, granting that the verb can mean to be silent but taking the silence here as the silence of death
- minorityHe is struck dumb, his mouth stopped, which suits the unclean lips he confesses in the same breath. Ancient translators read the line this way, and the reading has been revived by those who tie the form to the verb for being silent.; Isaiah 6:5 in the Syriac Peshitta, the Vulgate, and Symmachus, which render the verb as being struck dumb; HALOT, s.v. דמה II (p. 225), giving "be silent" as a sense of this verb