StrongerBible

magor

מָגוֹר

HebrewH4032“terror, fear, ...”

Appears 8 times · tap a cell to see the verses

Psa 31:13(14)Isa 31:9Jer 6:25Jer 20:4Jer 20:10Jer 46:5Jer 49:29Lam 2:22
Names & words formed with this
Word studymah-GOREnoun

What magor means

terror: fear that has closed in from every direction, leaving nowhere to run

TranslatabilityApproximateCertaintyStrong

Six of this word's eight appearances sit inside the same two-word cry, "terror on every side." That cry is less a description of a mood than of a position. The enemy has closed the ring, the roads out are unsafe, and there is no direction left to run. Hebrew has other words for the shudder that runs through a frightened person (פַּחַד); this one begins with the situation and lets the feeling follow from it.

The cry lands on very different kinds of victims, and the pattern is worth seeing whole:

  • Jerusalem, warned to stay off the roads because the enemy has a sword out (Jeremiah 6:25)
  • Egypt's army breaking and running at the river, its strongest soldiers cut down (Jeremiah 46:5)
  • the tent camps of Kedar, stripped of their flocks, their curtains, and their camels (Jeremiah 49:29)
  • one man who can hear his own friends whispering, waiting for him to slip (Psalm 31:13, Jeremiah 20:10)

Because the word looks outward at what is causing the fear, it can also name the frightening thing itself. God tells the priest Pashhur that he will become a terror to himself and to everyone who loves him, and in the verse just before that he renames him with the cry itself (Jeremiah 20:3). Lamentations uses the plural of the attackers God summoned against the city, as though they were guests called in to a feast.

Only once does the word stand outside the fixed phrase. Isaiah says the rock of Assyria, its stronghold and its king, will pass away out of sheer terror while its officers panic at the sight of a battle standard. There the word means nothing more or less than dread, which is what the cry is built out of.

Nuances

1athe fixed cry "terror on every side": what is shouted over a city, an army, or a man whose neighbors have turned on him
Psa 31:13(14)Jer 6:25Jer 20:10Jer 46:5Jer 49:29
1bdread on its own, outside the set phrase: the panic that makes even a stronghold give way
Isa 31:9
1can object of dread: the person or the force that everyone else is terrified of
Jer 20:4Lam 2:22

What scholars say about magor

The lexica take מָגוֹר as a noun formed with prefixed mem from the root גור meaning to be afraid (BDB, gûr III; HALOT, gwr II; DCH), a root kept formally distinct from the homographic roots meaning to sojourn and to attack, although STEPBible files all three under H1481. The controlling datum is distributional: six of the eight occurrences stand in the stereotyped phrase מָגוֹר מִסָּבִיב, and a seventh instance of the phrase is lexicalized as the symbolic name given to Pashhur in Jeremiah 20:3, tagged separately as H4036. The phrase is concentrated in Jeremiah (6:25; 20:4, 10; 46:5; 49:29), and Psalm 31:13 (Hebrew 31:14) shares an entire clause with Jeremiah 20:10, כי שמעתי דבת רבים מגור מסביב, a correspondence that commentators on both books treat as a literary link between the psalm and the Jeremianic laments, without agreement on the direction of dependence (McKane). Two occurrences are handled differently across the reference works. Jeremiah 20:4 uses the noun objectively, of Pashhur as the object rather than the subject of fear, which BDB glosses as object of terror. Lamentations 2:22 has the plural with a first person suffix, מגורי, generally taken the same objective way of the attackers summoned against Zion, though the rendering "my terrors" leaves the affective reading open (Hillers). Isaiah 31:9, the only occurrence outside the fixed phrase, uses the noun with the preposition min in a clause whose sense is secured by the parallel colon about officers panicking at a battle standard (Wildberger). No occurrence carries a significant text-critical difficulty.

Sources

  • BDB, s.v. מָגוֹרlexicon
  • HALOT, s.v. מָגוֹרlexicon
  • DCH, s.v. מָגוֹרlexicon
  • William McKane, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Jeremiah, Volume 1: Introduction and Commentary on Jeremiah I-XXV (ICC, 1986)commentary
  • Delbert R. Hillers, Lamentations (Anchor Bible 7A, 2nd ed., 1992)commentary
  • Hans Wildberger, Isaiah 28-39 (Continental Commentaries, 2002)commentary

AI-generated word study · claude-opus-4-8

All attested forms of מָגוֹר

m s absolute

מָגוֹר, מָּגוֹר

Psa 31:13, Jer 6:25, Jer 20:4, Jer 20:10, Jer 46:5, Jer 49:29, Isa 31:9

m p construct

מְגוּרַי

Lam 2:22