rain: water falling from the sky, the general Hebrew word for rainfall of any kind
This is the ordinary word for rain, and it is the broadest one Hebrew has. The language names falling water with about ten different terms, each with its own angle: another general word many read as the heavier downpour (גֶּשֶׁם), the autumn rains that soften hard ground for plowing (יוֹרֶה), the spring rains the grain harvest depends on (מַלְקוֹשׁ), the night dew (טַל), the poetic showers (רְבִיבִים), the driving storm (זֶרֶם). This word sits at the center of that group as the plain, general term, and it takes its color from the verse it stands in rather than from anything built into the word itself. Deuteronomy 32:2 sets four of them side by side in one sentence.
The setting gives the word enormous weight. Israel's land had no great river to irrigate it, so a harvest depended entirely on rain arriving in its season, and Deuteronomy makes the point directly by contrasting Egypt, watered by hand and foot, with a land that drinks the rain of heaven. So rain turns up again and again as something God hands out or holds back:
- given in its season as the sign that the covenant is intact
- shut up in the sky as the standard punishment when it is broken
- asked for in prayer, and promised again, once a drought has run long
Elijah's announcement that there will be no rain except at his word, and the silent years that follow it, are that whole pattern told as a story.
The word also carries an argument. Israel's neighbors credited rain to Baal, the storm god of Canaan, and the Old Testament keeps insisting that the sky belongs to the LORD instead. Zechariah tells people to ask the LORD for rain at the season when the spring rains are due, and the contest on Mount Carmel is finally decided by who can break a drought. At the same time the Bible refuses to reduce rain to a wage paid for good behavior: the answer to Job out of the storm asks who fathers the rain, and points to water falling on empty country where it does nobody any good.
Disputed
Whether מָטָר and גֶּשֶׁם differ in what they denote, or only in style and literary setting.
- majorityמָטָר is the semantically unmarked, general term for rain of any kind, while גֶּשֶׁם foregrounds heavy rainfall or a downpour, so the two nouns differ in denotation.; HALOT, s.v. גֶּשֶׁם; H.-J. Zobel, "מָטָר māṭār / גֶּשֶׁם gešem," in Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1997), 8:250-65
- minorityThe two nouns are essentially co-referential in denotation, and their distribution reflects style and genre rather than the intensity of the rainfall.; Mark D. Futato, "Because It Had Rained: A Study of Gen 2:5-7," Westminster Theological Journal 60 (1998): 1-21; Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs (AB 7C; Doubleday, 1977)