to strike a hard, driving blow: to hammer, pound, or batter something down
This is the verb of the hammer. Hebrew has broad, all-purpose words for hitting; this one keeps a specific picture behind it, a heavy blow that lands with weight and drives whatever it hits. The tool itself is named from the same root: the workman's hammer in Jael's hand (הַלְמוּת), and so is the word for the "blows" a fool's own mouth earns him in Proverbs (מַהֲלֻמֿוֹת).
Because the picture is force landing on something, the word travels easily from the workshop to the battlefield to the vineyard:
- a smith beating hot metal on the anvil
- a tent peg driven through a sleeping man's skull
- carved paneling smashed apart with axes
- horses' hooves pounding the ground as an army gallops away
- invaders battering down the choice vines of a conquered land
Its strangest use turns the blow inward. In Isaiah 28:1 the leaders of Ephraim are people whom wine has struck down, not merely tipsy but hammered flat and lying where the blow left them. That is the same verb, used of drink as if drink were the one swinging.
In all eight of its appearances the one landing the blow is a person, an animal, or a thing. God is never its subject, which sets it apart from the general Hebrew verb for striking (נָכָה), the word used again and again of God striking a land or a people.