zimmah

This word comes from a verb that means to think something through and plan it. So at its root it names something planned, a purpose a person has sat down and worked out. In one place it is simply that, with no shadow on it: Job speaks of his own plans being cut short by death.

Everywhere else the planning is bent toward harm. It is the scoundrel plotting to ruin the poor with lies, the fool whose schemes are sin, the hands full of a wicked plot alongside a bribe. The word carries a chill even here: not a sudden, hot-tempered wrong, but calculated intent, an evil thought out in advance.

From the same idea of a plotted evil, the word hardens into a name for the vilest and most premeditated wrongs, and above all sexual ones. The law uses it for incest and for driving a whole land into prostitution. Ezekiel turns it into the drumbeat word for Jerusalem and Samaria, whose unfaithfulness to God he pictures as brazen harlotry. Job uses it for adultery, and Judges for the outrage at Gibeah.

Its force is not the heat of passion but the cold, shameless, calculated quality of the sin. This is wrong that is planned, done without shame, and so vile that the community is expected to purge it rather than tolerate it.

Once, in Hosea, it brands the murderous violence of corrupt priests, which shows the word can label any calculated atrocity, not sexual sin alone.