heat: warmth felt in the air, in the seasons, or in a thing, and so also the hottest stretch of the day
This is the ordinary word for heat as something a person feels. It covers the warmth hanging in the air at noon, the scorching that dries up land and water, and the warmth still left in a loaf just out of the oven. It never means anger, and it never names the sun itself.
Its most frequent use is as a clock rather than a thermometer. "The heat of the day" is a time: the hours around midday when outdoor work stops and people rest in the shade. Abraham is sitting at his tent door then (Genesis 18:1), Ish-bosheth is lying down for his midday rest then (2 Samuel 4:5), and Saul's men fight from before dawn until then (1 Samuel 11:11). The rescue promised to Jabesh Gilead is fixed the same way, for the time when the sun grows hot (1 Samuel 11:9).
Where the heat is the thing itself rather than a time marker, it usually carries weight:
- In Genesis 8:22 it is one half of a cycle God promises will never stop, set beside cold as seedtime is set beside harvest.
- In Job 24:19 and Jeremiah 17:8 it is what kills, drinking up the melted snow and withering whatever is not rooted beside water.
- In Isaiah 18:4 it is a picture of God's stillness, a shimmer over the light and a cloud of dew in the heat of harvest time.
The word belongs to a large family built on the idea of being hot. Beside it stand the verb for growing warm (חָמַם), the word that says a particular thing is hot (חָם), 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.