terror as a great power projects it: the dread a conquering nation lays on everyone within reach
This word names terror from the side of the one who causes it. It is not the fear a person feels inside; it is the dread a dominating power puts on other people, the reputation that makes neighboring nations give way without a fight.
All eight uses stand in Ezekiel, and seven of them in one long funeral poem over the nations lying in the grave. The same line comes back like a refrain: they spread their terror in the land of the living. Assyria, Elam, Meshech and Tubal, the princes of the north, and Tyre before them are all described in exactly the same words, and the repetition is the point. Every one of these powers is remembered for the fear it once projected, and every one of them is now lying among the slain.
The word belongs to a family built on the picture of something breaking. The verb behind it (חָתַת) is used of bows that snap and of armies whose nerve gives way, so the dread named here is not vague unease: it is fear that breaks a people's will to resist. Hebrew has other terror words that look at the same thing from the opposite side, naming what the frightened people feel (אֵימָה, מָגוֹר); this one keeps its eye on the power casting the shadow.
The closing line of the poem turns the whole picture around. God says the terror in the land of the living was his own doing, taking into his own hand the very thing these empires had boasted of.
Whether Ezekiel 32:30 reads the noun for terror, as the Hebrew text has it, or a shorter related word meaning "shattered," following the Greek version.
- majorityThe Masoretic Text stands: the phrase names the terror these princes caused by their might, which now turns to their shame.; HALOT (Koehler-Baumgartner), s.v. חתית
- minorityThe consonants should be read as the adjective חתים, "shattered in their might," with the Septuagint.; BDB (Brown-Driver-Briggs), s.v. חת II