ḥalam

In the Bible dreaming is rarely idle. It is one of the ordinary ways God makes something known, and the word for it runs like a thread through the great dream stories: Jacob at Bethel, Joseph and his sheaves and stars, Pharaoh's cows and grain, the Midianite soldier's barley loaf, and Nebuchadnezzar's troubled nights. Some of these dreams speak plainly; most come as riddles that need a God-given interpreter, which is why Joseph and Daniel matter as much as the dreamers do.

Because a dream could carry such authority, Israel had to guard against people who used it to speak for God when God had not spoken. So the law names a category, the dreamer of dreams, and warns that even a dream whose sign comes true is worthless if it leads away from the LORD. Jeremiah mocks the prophets who cry, I have dreamed, I have dreamed, and asks what straw has in common with wheat. The point is never that dreams are automatically false, only that a dream is not self-proving: its content must be tested.

The same word is also used for something fleeting and unreal, the way a hungry man dreams he is eating and wakes still empty, or the way returning exiles felt they must be dreaming. And in Joel the word turns hopeful again: in the last days old men will dream dreams, a promise that the channel once reserved for a few will be opened to all.

This is a separate word that happens to be spelled exactly like the word for dreaming, and it has nothing to do with sleep. It points to health, strength, and returning vigor.

It survives in only two places. In one, the young of wild goats grow strong and thrive out in the open, healthy without any human care. In the other, King Hezekiah, near death from illness, prays to be made well again and to live. Because the word is so rare, and because one of its two verses sits in a difficult, damaged stretch of poetry, English Bibles render it in different ways: grow strong, thrive, be in good condition, restore to health, recover.

Some scholars think this healthy sense and the dreaming sense go back to one ancient word whose thread was vigor, the same vitality that made a young animal robust, a sick king well, and, in the old view, the dreaming mind alive. Others keep them apart as unrelated look-alikes. Either way, a reader who knows only that this spelling means to dream will miss it here.