to grow dark or to make dark: for light to fail, or to be blotted out
TranslatabilityDirectCertaintySettled
At its heart this verb is about light failing. It covers both sides of that event: light going dark on its own (the sun setting, the stars going out, a lamp burning down) and someone making the light go dark (God blotting out the day, a cloud swallowing the sun). One word carries both the quiet fading and the deliberate blotting-out.
The Bible stretches this plain picture in a few directions:
The sky and its lights go dark, often as a picture of disaster or of the LORD's day of judgment.
A person's eyes grow dark, a way of naming failing sight, crushing grief, or approaching death.
Skin turns dark and shrunken under famine and suffering.
Understanding itself is darkened, as when empty words cloud good advice, or when darkness fails to hide anything from God.
Because the same verb runs from a literal sunset to a clouded mind, the setting decides whether the darkness is out in the sky, in someone's eyes, or in their thinking. It is the action word behind the more familiar noun for darkness itself (חֹשֶׁךְ).
Nuances
1afor the sun, stars, day, or a lamp to go dark; for the sky or land to be plunged into darkness, often as a sign of judgment
This is the plain, physical word for light being blocked or withdrawn so that things can no longer be seen: locusts covering the land until it went dark, or the sun blacked out at its rising.Exo 10:15Isa 13:10
It reaches into everyday loss of sight, describing eyes that grow dim and fail with old age, and the light of dawn or day being held back.Ecc 12:3Job 3:9
It is the word used to make the abstract point that darkness itself is no barrier to God, for whom the dark is as bright as day.Psa 139:12
Both
Both describe the light of day failing as an act of judgment, and Micah stacks the two together so that the daytime goes dark over the false prophets.Mic 3:6
It carries a mourning sense that the other word never has: a person going about black and gloomy in grief, wearing the look of a mourner though no sun has burned them.Job 30:28Psa 35:14Psa 38:6
It stretches from a grieving face to whole peoples and even the land itself sinking into gloom and lament under judgment.Jer 8:21Jer 14:2
It pictures the heavens turning black and heavy, the sky going dark with storm clouds and wind.1Ki 18:45Jer 4:28
ḥashakh in the other biblical languages
σκοτίζωGreek“to darken”the Greek verb "to darken," used the same way for the sun going dark and, in the New Testament, for a darkened mind, heart, or eyes.
What scholars say about ḥashakh
The standard lexica treat חשׁך as a single root meaning "be dark," inflected intransitively in the qal (light grows dark) and causatively in the hiphil (to make dark, to darken). BDB and HALOT catalog the physical darkening of the luminaries and the day, the extended use for eyes dimming (Ps 69:23;Eccl 12:3;Lam 5:17) and skin blackening (Lam 4:8), and the figurative "darken/obscure" of Job 38:2 ("who darkens counsel") and Ps 139:12. The prophetic clustering of the verb in Day-of-the-LORD contexts (Isa 13:10;Amos 5:8; 8:9; Mic 3:6) is widely read in the commentaries as deliberate un-creation imagery, reversing the light of Genesis 1. There is no dispute over the core sense.