StrongerBible

ḥam

חָם

HebrewH2525hot, warm

Appears 2 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Jos 9:12Job 37:17
Root family
Word studyResearch-gradeKHAHMadjective

What ḥam means

hot: having heat in it at the moment, as bread just out of the oven or clothing warmed by the air

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintySettled

This is the plain, everyday word for something that has heat in it right now. It describes ordinary objects a person can touch: the bread in a traveler's bag, the clothes on a person's back. It never describes a fire or a flame, and unlike some words from the same root it never shifts over to anger or passion.

In both places it occurs, the warmth makes a point about something else. In Joshua 9:12 the men of Gibeon say their bread was still warm when they packed it and is now dry and crumbling, which is their proof of a long journey they never actually made. In Job 37:17 Elihu asks Job whether he understands how his own clothes turn warm when the land lies still under the south wind. The warmth is evidence in each case: of time passed in the first, of weather no person controls in the second.

The word sits in a large family built on the idea of heat. Beside it stand the noun for heat itself (חֹם), the verb for growing warm (חָמַם), the poetic name for the sun (חַמָּה), and, at the far end of the range, the word for boiling anger (חֵמָה). Only that last one has left physical temperature behind. This adjective stays literal everywhere it is used.

Jos 9:12Job 37:17

What scholars say about ḥam

The standard lexica (BDB, HALOT, DCH, Gesenius 18. Aufl.) treat חָם as the verbal adjective of the root חמם, glossing it "hot, warm," with three attestations: Josh 9:12 (the Gibeonites' provisions), 1 Sam 21:7 (the showbread), and Job 37:17 (garments in the sirocco). The morphological data behind this entry tags only Josh 9:12 and Job 37:17 under H2525; at 1 Sam 21:7 it reads the substantive חֹם. The root is pan-Semitic (Akkadian emēmu "be hot" and ummu "heat, fever"; Ugaritic ḥmm; Arabic ḥamma; Ethiopic ḥamama, with the shift to "be sick"), and its Hebrew derivatives spread widely: חֹם "heat," חַמָּה "sun" (a poetic byname for שֶׁמֶשׁ, on the qattal-â pattern typical of natural phenomena), חֵמָה "wrath, venom," and חַמָּן, now read as "incense altar" on the strength of Palmyrene and Nabatean inscriptions labeling small stone burners חמנא, together with the Umm el-ʿAmed Phoenician dedications (de Vaux, Ancient Israel, 286), against the older "sun pillar" of W. Robertson Smith and de Lagarde. The live disagreements in this family lie elsewhere than in the adjective: HALOT and DCH split חֵמָה I "wrath" from חֵמָה II "venom" on etymological grounds (a distinct Proto-Semitic *ḥmt-, cf. Akkadian imtu "spittle, venom," with the -t- retained in Hebrew חֵמֶת "waterskin"), where BDB, Gesenius, and Klein unify them. Two homographs are firmly distinguished from this word by every serious lexicon. The first is חָם "father-in-law" (specifically a woman's husband's father, four suffixed attestations in Gen 38 and 1 Sam 4; Proto-Semitic *ḥamw-, a III-w noun on the pattern of *ʾab(w)- and *ʾaḫ(w)-, per Wilson-Wright, BSOAS 79 [2016]), which belongs to the sex-differentiated in-law system described by Andersen and Rendsburg and stands over against חֹתֵן, the husband's father-in-law. The second is the personal name חָם (Ham), whose etymology Goldenberg (The Curse of Ham, 2003, ch. 10, esp. 149) shows cannot be "hot": the LXX form Χάμ points to an underlying velar ḫ rather than the pharyngeal ḥ of the heat root, which rules out the traditional "hot" derivation along with the proposed Egyptian kmt "the Black Land" and ḥm "servant." Hendel allows at most a folk-etymological reformulation without cognation. The consensus verdict on the name is that its origin is unknown.

In-depth research

This is a research paper, so it may be hard to read without scholarly background. It is useful if you want to dig even deeper into this word.

Sources

  • BDB (Brown, Driver, Briggs), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, s.v. חמם, 328lexicon
  • HALOT (Koehler, Baumgartner, Stamm; Eng. ed. Richardson), s.v. חָםlexicon
  • DCH (D. J. A. Clines, ed.), The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, s.v. חָםlexicon
  • Gesenius, Hebräisches und Aramäisches Handwörterbuch über das Alte Testament, 18. Aufl. (Meyer, Donner, Rüterswörden), s.v. חָםlexicon
  • Aren Wilson-Wright, "Father, Brother, and Father-in-Law as III-w Nouns in Semitic," BSOAS 79/1 (2016): 23-32article
  • Francis I. Andersen, "Israelite Kinship Terminology and Social Structure," The Bible Translator 20 (1969): 29-39article
  • Gary A. Rendsburg, "Kinship Terms," in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, ed. G. Khan (Brill, 2013), 2:470-477reference-work
  • David M. Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Princeton University Press, 2003), 141-156monograph
  • Roland de Vaux, Ancient Israel: Its Life and Institutions, 286monograph
  • Ronald Hendel, Genesis 1-11: A New Translation and Commentary, Anchor Yale Bible (2013)commentary

All attested forms of חָם

m p absolute

חַמִּים

Job 37:17

m s absolute

חָם

Jos 9:12