kidon

This is a weapon word, and it only ever turns up in a fight. It belongs to the standard battle kit: Goliath comes out with his sword, his spear, and one of these; the war horse in Job gallops at the glint of it; Leviathan laughs when one rattles against him; and the invading armies in Jeremiah ride in gripping bow and this weapon together. The Bible never once stops to describe it.

So what did it look like? For centuries the answer was a javelin, a light spear meant to be thrown, and most English Bibles still say so. Three things in the text pull the other way:

• Goliath wears his "between his shoulders," which sounds like something slung across the back rather than balanced for a throw.
• At Ai, Joshua holds his out toward the city and keeps it out until the fighting is over, which is a strange thing to do with a weapon you are meant to hurl.
• It is always counted as a separate item from the spear (חֲנִית) and from the sword (חֶרֶב), so it was neither of those.

The Dead Sea Scrolls added a fourth clue. A battle manual found at Qumran describes this weapon in careful detail: a polished metal blade roughly two feet long, sharpened along its edge. That is a sword, not a missile. Since the middle of the last century most specialists have read the word as a short curved sword, something like a scimitar, though the older understanding has not disappeared and translations have been slow to follow.

Either way, the picture is of a blade in a soldier's hand at close range. That is what lets Joshua raise his and hold it steady as a battle signal: everyone can see it, and as long as it stays up the attack goes on.