to hand a thing over to God for good, by destroying it or by giving it up forever, so it can never return to ordinary human use
At its core this word means to take something out of common life and surrender it irrevocably to God. That single idea splits into two outcomes that look like opposites: in war it means wiping a people or city out completely, and at the sanctuary it means handing property or a person over to God so permanently that it can never be sold back or bought back. Both are the same act seen from different angles, the giving up of any claim on the thing, whether the thing is then killed or kept.
Most often the word names the war ban: Israel devotes the enemy to total destruction at God's command, sparing nothing. The destruction is framed as an offering, not mere slaughter, which is why Achan's theft from the devoted spoil at Jericho is treated as robbing God. Used of foreign armies or as plain intensive language, the same verb can simply mean to annihilate utterly, with the religious frame faded out.
The prophets reuse it for God's own judgment: now it is God who devotes nations, and even Israel, to ruin. Alongside all of this runs the quieter cultic use, where a field, an animal, or a person is set apart to God forever and counted as most holy, given to the priests rather than killed. The word never settles into one tone, because in ancient thought what is given wholly to God is both sacred and untouchable at once.
Nuances
Disputed
Whether the root means fundamentally destruction or fundamentally consecration, and whether the war ban is itself a form of sacrifice to God.
- majorityThe core idea is irrevocable consecration or transfer to God, and destruction in war is one extreme way of removing a thing from common use; the cultic devotion of Leviticus 27 lies closer to the root than the bloody war ban.; Norbert Lohfink, "חרם ḥāram; חֵרֶם ḥērem," in TDOT 5 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986), 182-192; C. H. W. Brekelmans, "חֵרֶם ḥērem ban," in TLOT 1:474-477; J. P. U. Lilley, "Understanding the Ḥērem," Tyndale Bulletin 44 (1993): 169-177, at 173
- minorityThe war ban is a form of sacrifice: the enemy is God's portion, killed as an offering, paralleling vows like Jephthah's.; Susan Niditch, War in the Hebrew Bible: A Study in the Ethics of Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 28-55; Philip D. Stern, The Biblical Ḥerem: A Window on Israel's Religious Experience (BJS 211; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991), 218-220
- minorityDevotion to destruction and sacrifice are kept lexically and conceptually distinct in the Hebrew Bible and should not be merged.; Richard D. Nelson, "Ḥerem and the Deuteronomic Social Conscience," in Deuteronomy and Deuteronomic Literature, ed. M. Vervenne and J. Lust (BETL 133; Leuven: Peeters, 1997), 39-54; David Toshio Tsumura, The First Book of Samuel (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 384-410
Whether the war-ban laws of Deuteronomy and Joshua record an early historical practice or are a later scribal and ideological construction.
- majorityThe Deuteronomic ban is largely a seventh-century-and-later scribal program, retrojected onto a conquest that the archaeology does not support; the literary narratives are ideological rather than reportage.; Moshe Weinfeld, Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 282-297; Yair Hoffman, "The Deuteronomistic Concept of the Herem," ZAW 111 (1999): 196-210; Thomas B. Dozeman, Joshua 1-12 (AYB 6B; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 43-77
- majorityThe war ban is a genuine Iron-Age West Semitic institution attested outside Israel, even if the specific biblical narratives are later literary appropriations of it.; Lauren A. S. Monroe, "Israelite, Moabite and Sabaean War-ḥērem Traditions and the Forging of National Identity," VT 57 (2007): 318-341; Lauren A. S. Monroe, Josiah's Reform and the Dynamics of Defilement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)