mehumah

The standard lexica treat this as one noun of state built on the root behind the verbs הָמַם and הוּם, and gloss it "confusion, panic, tumult" (HALOT; BDB, which separates the panic of battle from the disquiet of Proverbs 15:16 and the thwarting confusion of Deuteronomy 28:20). DCH records the same range. The heaviest concentration of uses belongs to the divine panic motif of Israel's war traditions, in which the LORD unnerves an enemy so that it turns on itself; von Rad's study of holy war and the later comparative treatment by Kang set out the pattern, and Zechariah 14:13 states the agency outright by binding the noun directly to the divine name. Commentators note the pairing of the noun with its cognate verb at Deuteronomy 7:23 (Tigay) and the textual difficulty of the surrounding oracle at Ezekiel 7:5 to 11 (Zimmerli), where the noun itself is nevertheless secure. At 1 Samuel 5:9 the older English versions take the word as the havoc rather than the terror, which is a rendering question and not a lexical one. Commentators on Ezekiel 22:5 generally read the phrase as a description of Jerusalem's own internal turbulence, matching the catalogue of civic crimes in the verses that follow, and Wolff reads the plural at Amos 3:9 of the social disorder created by oppression inside Samaria. Proverbs 15:16 is rendered "turmoil" or "trouble" by Waltke and Fox, the use furthest from battlefield panic and the one that shows the noun is not restricted to warfare.