StrongerBible

hillul

הִלּוּל

HebrewH1974“praise, merrymaking, ...”

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Lev 19:24Jdg 9:27
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradehil-LOOLnoun

What hillul means

a harvest thanksgiving celebration: the loud, festive praise made when a fruit or grape crop has been gathered in

TranslatabilityPartialCertaintyStrong

This word turns praising into an event. It is the noun formed from the ordinary verb for praising, הָלַל, and where that verb describes the act, this word names the occasion: the shouting, eating, and drinking that go with a crop safely brought in. It appears only twice in the Hebrew Bible, and both times in the plural, as though the celebration were counted in bursts of noise rather than treated as a single thing.

The two verses show that celebration from opposite sides:

  • In Judges the men of Shechem tread their grapes, hold the celebration, and then feast in the temple of their own god.
  • In Leviticus the fruit of a young tree's fourth year is declared holy to the LORD, the crop itself handed over as the thanksgiving.

Nothing in the word decides which god is being thanked, which is why many readers hear something pointed in the Judges scene: the harvest praise that belonged to the LORD is spent on Baal-Berith instead, in the very temple whose treasury had paid for Abimelech.

Because the evidence is so thin, the safest definition stays broad: a festival at which a harvest is met with praise. Nearby words fill out the picture without being the same. The general term for a set feast is חַג, praise as song or as the renown it wins is תְּהִלָּה, and neither one ties itself to the vintage the way this word does.

Nuances

1athe vintage feast itself: the celebrating that followed the treading of the grapes
Jdg 9:27
1bproduce set apart to the LORD as this thanksgiving: a fourth-year crop given rather than eaten
Lev 19:24
Lev 19:24

Whether the plural noun in Leviticus 19:24 names the occasion of celebration or designates the fourth-year fruit itself as a consecrated thanksgiving, and therefore who may consume that fruit.

  • contestedThe fruit itself is the consecrated thanksgiving, holy to the LORD and so not the owner's to enjoy, which in practice assigns it to the priests, as the Qumran texts on fourth-year produce assume.; BDB, s.v. הִלּוּל (Leviticus 19:24: "holiness of praise, i.e. a consecrated thing in token of thanksgiving for fruit, offered in 4th year"); Menahem Kister, "Some Aspects of Qumranic Halakhah," in The Madrid Qumran Congress, ed. Julio Trebolle Barrera and Luis Vegas Montaner (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 2:576-588; Itamar Kislev, "The Struggle over the Character of Israelite Worship: The Law of Orlah and Fourth-Year Fruit," Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies (2004): 27-50
  • contestedThe word names a festival of jubilation for the finished harvest, so the produce is consumed by the owner in celebration before the LORD, the reading that underlies the rabbinic treatment of fourth-year fruit as a second tithe.; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, trans. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, s.v. הִלּוּלִים ("festival days, celebrated on account of the finished harvest, public thanksgivings"); Mishnah, Maʿaser Sheni 5 and Peʾah 7:6 (fourth-year produce treated as second tithe, taken up and eaten by the owner)

What scholars say about hillul

The noun is built on a pattern that regularly forms action nouns from the intensive verbal stem (compare כִּפּוּר, שִׁקּוּץ, שִׁלּוּם), so it denotes the act or the occasion of praising, and it survives only in the plural הִלּוּלִים. BDB glosses the headword "rejoicing, praise" and is unusual in dividing the two occurrences, giving "a vintage-rejoicing, merry-making, connected with thanksgiving" for Judges 9:27 and "holiness of praise, i.e. a consecrated thing in token of thanksgiving for fruit, offered in 4th year" for Leviticus 19:24; Gesenius does not divide them, glossing both as festival days celebrated on account of the finished harvest. HALOT and DCH fall in the same range (jubilation, festival of rejoicing), and the ancient versions all read the praise root: the Septuagint has αἰνετός at Leviticus 19:24 and χοροὺς at Judges 9:27, the Targumim render תּוּשְׁבְּחָן, and the Vulgate speaks of festive choirs. Comparative Semitic evidence supports a base sense of raising a cry rather than of shining: Akkadian alālu is a harvest work song and a shout of joy, and Arabic hallala is the cry raised at the sighting of the new moon, the argument Wellhausen and Nöldeke used against deriving the praise sense from הלל I (to shine); Ringgren in TDOT and Westermann in TLOT both treat the noun as a jubilation derivative. Itamar Kislev, building on Menahem Kister, argues that the Holiness author of Leviticus 19 inserted the term into an older vine-specific deconsecration law, generalizing it from the vine to every fruit tree and reassigning the produce from owner to priest in order to restrain an exuberant annual vintage festival of the sort presupposed by Judges 9:27 and by the verbal usage of Isaiah 62:9; the Qumran material (Temple Scroll 60:3-4, 4QMMT B 62-63, Jubilees 7:35-36) assigns fourth-year fruit to the priests, against the rabbinic treatment of it as second tithe, and this priest-versus-owner split has been read as a marker of the wider halakhic divide. On Judges 9:27 the vintage-feast setting is uncontroversial across the commentaries, and the identity of the Shechemite covenant deity called Baal-Berith and El-Berith is treated at length by Theodore J. Lewis.

Where scholars disagree about hillul

Whether the word at Leviticus 19:24 belongs to the praise root at all, since the Samaritan Pentateuch reads instead a look-alike word from the root meaning to profane or to put to first use.

  • majorityThe Masoretic reading from the praise root is original, and the ancient versions confirm it: the Septuagint, the Targumim and the Vulgate all understood praise or festive song here.; BDB, s.v. הִלּוּל; Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, trans. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, s.v. הִלּוּלִים
  • minorityTwo originally separate rites lie behind these texts, the one-time deconsecration of a newly planted vineyard and the annual vintage thanksgiving, and the priestly author deliberately wove the praise term into the vineyard law, so the Samaritan variant and the rabbinic wordplay preserve a real link between the two words.; Menahem Kister, "Some Aspects of Qumranic Halakhah," in The Madrid Qumran Congress, ed. Julio Trebolle Barrera and Luis Vegas Montaner (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 2:576-588; Itamar Kislev, "The Struggle over the Character of Israelite Worship: The Law of Orlah and Fourth-Year Fruit," Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies (2004): 27-50
In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. הִלּוּלlexicon
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, Hebrew and Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament Scriptures, trans. Samuel Prideaux Tregelles, s.v. הִלּוּלִיםlexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. הִלּוּלlexicon
  • D. J. A. Clines, ed., The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, vol. 2, s.v. הִלּוּלlexicon
  • Helmer Ringgren, "הלל," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, ed. G. Johannes Botterweck and Helmer Ringgrentheological dictionary
  • Claus Westermann, "הלל," in Theological Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Ernst Jenni and Claus Westermanntheological dictionary
  • Menahem Kister, "Some Aspects of Qumranic Halakhah," in The Madrid Qumran Congress, ed. Julio Trebolle Barrera and Luis Vegas Montaner (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 2:576-588article
  • Itamar Kislev, "The Struggle over the Character of Israelite Worship: The Law of Orlah and Fourth-Year Fruit," Shnaton: An Annual for Biblical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies (2004): 27-50article
  • Theodore J. Lewis, "The Identity and Function of El/Baal Berith," Journal of Biblical Literature 115, no. 3 (1996): 401-423article
  • Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22, Anchor Bible (New York: Doubleday, 2000)commentary
  • Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus, JPS Torah Commentary (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989)commentary
  • Jack M. Sasson, Judges 1-12, Anchor Yale Bible (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014)commentary
  • Robert G. Boling, Judges, Anchor Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975)commentary
  • Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 149-152monograph

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of הִלּוּל

m p absolute

הִלּוּלִים

Lev 19:24, Jdg 9:27