Hush!: a clipped order to stop talking at once, and the act of hushing someone into silence.
This is less a word than a noise. Hebrew wrote down the sound people make when they shush one another, roughly what English spells "shh," and the sound hardened into something that could be given as an order and eventually used as a verb. That is why it is so short, and why in six of its eight appearances it is the whole sentence.
It turns up in three kinds of moment, and the distance between them is the distance between mild impatience and real fear:
- a room is cleared or a weeping crowd is calmed so that something can proceed
- people stop speaking because saying anything out loud has become dangerous
- everyone alive is ordered to go quiet because God is about to act
The third use is the memorable one. Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Zechariah each end a section by commanding the whole earth to hush before the LORD, and the word they reach for is the same one a man uses to clear a room of servants. It is not the hush of a quiet chapel. It is the hush of a courtroom when the judge walks in.
Hebrew has calmer words for silence. One of them (חָשָׁה) describes holding back from speech, and it stands right beside this word in Nehemiah 8:11, where the Levites are quieting the people even as they say "Hush." That word names the silence; this one is the order that produces it.