the farthest or innermost part of a bounded space: its back, its depths, or its remotest edge, measured from the normal way in
This word names the farthest point of a bounded space, seen from wherever a person normally stands or enters. It is the back wall of a tent, the deep interior of a cave, the belly of a ship, the remotest corner of a land, the sunken floor of the grave, and the towering recesses of a sacred mountain. In every case it marks the place where the familiar space runs out.
The senses can look scattered at first (rear, recesses, depths, far ends), but they are one idea flexed to fit different spaces. What counts as farthest depends on the space: in a building it is the closed back end away from the door, in a hollow it is the deepest inside, across a landscape it is the distant edge, and on a vertical scale it can be the lowest pit or the highest peak. The word does not by itself mean north, or down, or behind; it means as far as this space goes, and the context supplies the direction.
Hebrew poets loved this reach. Isaiah sets the highest height and the deepest depth in a single sentence, both named by this one word, as a proud king aims for the top of the divine mountain and is flung to the bottom of the grave. A psalm hands the phrase for the cosmic mountain's heights to God's own Zion. Amos shrinks the whole world down to the innermost corner of a plague-emptied house where only death is left standing.
It began as the feminine form of a word for the thigh or flank, and a faint memory of the body survives in it, but by the time of the Hebrew Bible it had settled firmly into this spatial meaning.
Nuances
Whether "the far reaches of Zaphon" (in Isaiah 14:13, Psalm 48:2, and Ezekiel 38-39) names the recesses or heights of the mythic sacred mountain of the Canaanite storm-god (Mount Zaphon of Ugaritic tradition) or simply the far geographic north as a compass direction.
- majorityIt reflects the Canaanite sacred mountain. The phrase is inherited from a fixed Ugaritic word-pair for the recesses and heights of Baal's mountain Zaphon, so it denotes the mythic cosmic summit rather than a mere compass bearing; Isaiah's tyrant aims at that summit and Psalm 48 transfers it polemically to Zion.; Frank Moore Cross, Canaanite Myth and Hebrew Epic (Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 36-43, 160-163; Richard J. Clifford, The Cosmic Mountain in Canaan and the Old Testament (HSM 4, 1972), pp. 57-79, 160-163; John Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan (JSOTSup 265, 2000), pp. 91-116
- minorityIt is chiefly the far geographic north. Especially in Ezekiel's Gog oracle the term marks real remote northern lands (Meshech, Tubal, Beth Togarmah), with any mythic overtones secondary; some also caution that no exact Ugaritic parallel to Isaiah 14:12-15 has survived.; Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2 (Hermeneia, 1983), pp. 285-324; Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, Chapters 25-48 (NICOT, 1998), pp. 434-447; Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 13-27 (Continental Commentary, 1997), p. 63