thin or fine: reduced to almost nothing, whether in thickness, in the size of its particles, or in the strength of a sound
One word, one idea, stretched over a surprising range of things. It belongs with the verb for grinding something into powder (דָּקַק), and every use flows from that: whatever has been brought down until there is next to nothing left of it. English keeps swapping words to follow it. The Hebrew never changes.
The same word covers all of this:
- Pharaoh dreams of cattle and ears of grain so starved that they are all bone and husk.
- The manna lies on the desert floor as fine as frost.
- The incense carried behind the curtain on the Day of Atonement has to be ground fine.
- Isaiah weighs whole nations and finds them no heavier than the dust on a set of scales.
- Elijah, after the wind and the earthquake and the fire, hears a sound so slight it is barely a sound.
In the laws of the sanctuary the word measures care. What is offered to God must be reduced to its finest possible form, and what disqualifies a priest or marks out a disease is a detail small enough to need a trained eye. The prophets take that same word and make it a statement about weight: something this fine counts for nothing, which is exactly Isaiah's point about the nations.
Two of its thirteen verses are long-running arguments. In the list of defects that keep a man from serving at the altar it is the only time the word describes a person, and nobody is certain what it means there. At Horeb it is the word behind the "still small voice," where the choice between a whisper and a silence changes how the whole scene reads.
Nuances
Which bodily defect the word names in the list that bars a descendant of Aaron from officiating at the altar. It is applied to a human being only here, and the ancient versions, the medieval commentators and the modern lexica pull in three directions.
- contestedA person of unusually short stature, a dwarf. The argument is contextual: the surrounding list catalogues gross, visible bodily anomalies, so a defect of stature suits the series, and this is the rendering of the KJV and of most modern English versions.; Ibn Ezra, commentary on Leviticus 21:20; René Péter-Contesse and John Ellington, A Handbook on Leviticus (United Bible Societies, 1990), on Leviticus 21:16-24
- contestedA person abnormally thin, wasted or consumptive. This is philologically the stronger reading, since the root means thin, fine or pulverized everywhere else and nowhere independently means short.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (Anchor Bible 3A; Doubleday, 2000), on Leviticus 21:16-24; BDB, s.v. דַּק; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Jewish Publication Society, 1989), on Leviticus 21:16-24
- minorityA defect of the eye or the skin, taken together with the words that follow. This has the oldest versional support: the Septuagint uses a word for blotchy or scaly skin, the Vulgate has lippus (bleary eyed), and the Palestinian Targums paraphrase in terms of eye and eyebrow deformities. No ancient version reads dwarf.; Septuagint and Vulgate, Leviticus 21:20; Rashi, commentary on Leviticus 21:20; New English Bible (Oxford and Cambridge, 1970), Leviticus 21:20
What Elijah hears at Horeb after the wind, the earthquake and the fire. All three words of the phrase are debatable, and this one, applied to a sound only here, decides the sense.
- majorityA faint, barely audible sound, a low whisper. The narrative contrast is deliberate: unlike the storm theophanies, the LORD is not in the spectacular phenomena but comes in quiet.; BDB, s.v. דַּק; Marvin A. Sweeney, I and II Kings: A Commentary (Old Testament Library; Westminster John Knox, 2007), on 1 Kings 19:11-13
- minorityGenuine silence, intensified: a sound of sheer silence, in which God is sensed precisely in the absence of sound. The text notably does not say that the LORD was not in this, as it does of the wind, earthquake and fire.; New Revised Standard Version (1989), 1 Kings 19:12; Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (W. W. Norton, 2019), on 1 Kings 19:12
- minorityAn overwhelming, crushing, thunderous sound, so that the encounter remains a full theophany. The argument runs from the crushing sense of the root דקק and from comparative Semitic usage, and from passages pairing קוֹל with roaring waters.; Johan Lust, "A Gentle Breeze or a Roaring, Thunderous Sound? Elijah at Horeb: 1 Kings XIX 12," Vetus Testamentum 25, no. 1 (1975): 110-115