ḥalom

At its core this is simply the word for a dream, what someone sees and lives through during sleep. The Bible never treats a dream as nothing. It is a real event of the night, and the same word covers the whole range of what that event can be.

Most often a dream is a way God reaches a sleeping person. He warns Abimelech, guides Jacob, calls Solomon, lets Joseph and Daniel see what is coming, and promises that one day ordinary people will dream his dreams. Used this way, a dream stands alongside vision and prophecy as a recognized channel of revelation, and the dramatic dreams of the Joseph and Daniel stories are symbolic puzzles that God both sends and explains.

But the same word also names a dream at its emptiest. Poets and wise men reach for it to picture whatever is fleeting and unreal: the wicked who vanish like a dream on waking, the hungry man who dreams of eating and wakes still starving. And the prophets use it for the lying dreams of those who claim to speak for God but speak only their own invention.

So the one word holds a striking tension. A dream can be the very voice of God, or it can be the textbook example of something that looks real and proves to be nothing. Which it is depends entirely on its source, and the Bible is sharply interested in telling the two apart.