sand: the loose, grainy material of a seashore or desert.
This word names sand, the loose grit that lines a seashore, fills a desert, or covers the ground. It is a plain, physical thing, and in a few places that is all it is: the stuff Moses buries a body in, or the barrier God fixes to hold back the sea.
Most of the time, though, the Bible reaches for sand as a picture rather than as a substance. Sand became the standard image for a number too large to count. When God promises Abraham descendants as many as the sand on the seashore, or an enemy army is said to be as thick as the sand, the point is sheer, uncountable abundance. This image is so fixed that it is often paired with the stars of the sky: the countless things below and the countless things above.
A smaller group of verses uses sand for weight instead of number. Job says his grief would outweigh the sand of the sea, and Proverbs measures a fool's provocation against the heaviness of sand. The same ordinary thing that suggests an endless quantity can also suggest a crushing load.
Nuances
Whether the word in Job 29:18 is the ordinary noun for "sand" (yielding "multiply my days like the sand," i.e. beyond counting) or a rare homonym naming the phoenix (yielding "like the phoenix," the bird fabled to renew its life).
- contestedThe ordinary word "sand," used as an image of an uncountable number of days.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. חוֹל
- contestedA homonym meaning "phoenix," the legendary long-lived bird, read from the same consonants and supported by an old interpretive tradition.; Marvin H. Pope, Job, Anchor Bible (1965); Robert Gordis, The Book of Job: Commentary, New Translation and Special Studies (1978)