a pointing word for this place or this point: "here, to here" in space, and "until now" in time
TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled
This is a small pointing word. Its whole job is to gesture toward where the speaker stands: "here, to this place." It shows up most often with verbs of coming, bringing, or returning, marking the direction of the movement toward the speaker.
From that one gesture the word stretches in two natural directions:
In space it means "here" or "to here": people come, are brought, or return to this place.
Doubled into a pair, it fans the pointing out both ways at once, "this way and that": waters split to either side, a man is kept busy back and forth.
Joined to a word for "up to," it points in time rather than space: "until now, thus far."
Biblical Hebrew has more than one word for "here." פֹּה marks a fixed spot you are standing on, and הֲלֹם also means "hither" with verbs of motion. This word is the most common of them, and it alone also carries the time sense "until now," which the others do not.
Nuances
1aof place: here, to this place; with verbs of motion, "to here, hither"
Points at the speaker's own spot, so movement described with it arrives where the speaker already is: people come, are brought down, or are led "here" to the one talking.Jos 2:2Gen 45:132Sa 1:10Ezk 40:4
Serves as the word for summoning someone closer, the call to turn aside, step up, or draw near to where the speaker stands.Pro 9:4Pro 9:16Pro 25:7Isa 57:3
Doubles up to mean "this way and that": the water parts to one side and the other, a man paces once one way and once back, two figures stand one on this bank and one on that.Jos 8:202Ki 2:82Ki 4:35Dan 12:5
Leaves the map altogether and marks a point in time reached so far: joined to a short word for "up to" it means "until now, up to this moment," as when Samuel says God has helped us this far.1Sa 7:12Psa 71:17Gen 44:28Jdg 16:13
Both
Both are bare pointing words that fix an action to a place instead of naming the place again, and the one verse that uses both sets them against each other: Absalom is told to come here, while he says it would have been better for him to stay there, back in the country he came from.2Sa 14:32
Both can name the goal of a movement and not merely a location, so each covers what older Bibles spelled with a special form: one is "hither" (bring my father down to here) and the other "thither" (escape to there until you arrive).Gen 45:13Jer 31:8Gen 19:22Gen 24:6
Is the everyday narrative word for a place away from the speaker that has just been named, saving the writer from repeating the name: God put the man there, Abram built an altar there, he called on the LORD there.Gen 2:8Gen 12:7Gen 21:33
Takes a short "from" fastened to its front to mean "from there," giving Hebrew a one word way to say motion out of the place just mentioned: the river divides from there, the people are scattered from there, a wife is to be fetched from there.Gen 2:10Gen 11:8Gen 24:7
Ties a description back to the place it belongs to, doing the work of the English "where": the place where his tent had been at the first, the place where he had stood before the LORD.Gen 13:3Gen 19:27
Stretches past any spot on a map to point at the world of the dead, or at a scene a poet stages without naming a location at all.Job 3:17Ecc 9:10Psa 14:5
hennah in the other biblical languages
ὧδεGreek“here”the ordinary Greek word for "here, to this place," the closest counterpart to the spatial sense
What scholars say about hennah
The lexicons treat hennah as a demonstrative adverb of place, "hither, here," characteristically used with verbs of motion (BDB; HALOT). The temporal use, "until now, hitherto," is a fixed collocation with the preposition "ad" ("up to"), a straightforward spatial-to-temporal extension of the same deictic base. The reduplicated construction hennah wa-hennah expresses "this way and that / on the one side and on the other." The form should be kept distinct from the interjection hinneh ("behold") and from the feminine plural pronoun hennah ("they, them"), which share the consonantal spelling but are separate words.